It’s been nearly a month since
Demand filed its S1, and I promised you all a longer look after my
initial posting. Here are some thoughts now that I’ve had a chance to digest the document. A caveat: I know Demand CEO Richard Rosenblatt well, and consider him a friend. And one of his investors, Oak, is an investor in my company, Federated Media. However, neither Oak nor Richard participated in the preparation of this post.
First off, the offering is notable for the number of banks that grace its cover sheet. I count ten, as many as Google had in its IPO back in 2004. That shows the hunger in the financial world for a win – and the company that gets in front of that hunger has a better chance than most to succeed in an offering, as those banks will all be pushing shares to their best clients.
But Demand’s S1 is far more traditional than Google’s. There’s no auction involved, and the company stays far away from the revolutionary prose espoused in Google’s S1 (remember “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one” ? And recall my response: “Yow,” I said to myself (and now to you…). “Do they really want to set themselves up like this?”)
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