About This Site

In an effort to better understand successful IPOs, we’ve started a research project. Tableau Software is a future IPO prospect. It’s also populated by data geeks. We wanted to examine IPOs based on the facts, not on folklore. Some questions of particular interest to us were:

• What are the attributes of the world’s top performing technology companies?
• What does it take to go public and how has this changed over time?
• Are there lessons from past IPOs that inform the future?

Such questions are hard to answer because it’s difficult to find information about technology companies beyond basic facts and stock price histories. For instance, what if you wanted to know if technology IPOs generally make good investments? Or how long it takes to build a great technology company? Or whether international sales matter to the success of an IPO? Such questions produce instinctive answers from most people in the technology industry. Folklore responses are common.

Why not look at the data? Wouldn’t it be interesting to combine data on the operational aspects of companies with their financial performance histories and search for patterns? That is the goal of most of the studies published on this site. For now it’s focused on software companies. Most of the content is about answering classic questions, debunking common myths, identifying patterns and trends, and analyzing new IPOs.

The next decade will be a great one for technology. Tough times create fantastic companies. As one writer points out:

• Hewlett Packard was started in 1938 when unemployment was 19%.
• Microsoft, Apple, and Intel all started during the brutal bear market of 1966-1982
• Google was an unprofitable start-up going into the great technology bust of 2000.

The impact of technology IPOs on our economy is tremendous: ComputerWorld reports that the Internet economy alone has created 1.2 million jobs. We need IPOs to help build the future of employment and prosperity.  The goal of this site is to help us better understand them.