from Hacker News

My experiences through GrubHub's IPO from start to finish

by dmarinoc on 2/9/15, 3:44 PM with 47 comments

  • by ilamont on 2/10/15, 4:42 AM

    If everything goes perfectly and the company has created a lot of buzz and momentum, there is interest to buy at a price above what has been printed on the S-1. As the pricing approaches, the company responds to this interest by increasing the price. Then the investors respond to the new price. This cycle repeats two to three times as the date approaches.

    So, the price was not based on fundamentals of the business, but rather buzz, hype, and tactics like restricting the number of shares. The common stock price has since risen but it's now running a P/E ratio of 135 (1).

    Who is getting the short end of the stick when reality kicks in? Mom and pop investors? Mutual funds and pensions?

    Also, what's with the "bootstrap" banner at the top of the page? Grubhub took $84 million in funding (2).

    1. http://research.investors.com/quotes/nyse-grubhub-inc-grub.h...

    2. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/grubhub

  • by psuter on 2/9/15, 5:17 PM

    Very interesting and educational read. Even if you know a little bit about how IPOs work, reading through the complete timeline helps understand the roles and the steps involved.

    One question that came after reading:

        The underwriter won’t move forward unless they get a very
    high percentage (99-100%) of employees/shareholders to sign
    a lock-up.
    What are the incentives for employees to sign such an agreement? It sounds like the only point in the process where an (organized) group of employees could have some leverage?

  • by jackgavigan on 2/9/15, 5:20 PM

    It's a pity he doesn't talk about how the stock was priced. GrubHub closed up 31% the day it IPO'd, which means that they left $59.2m on the table.

  • by ShellfishMeme on 2/9/15, 6:43 PM

    I'd be interested in experiences with what IPO means for internal processes, especially in the software engineering parts of the company.

    Any more supervision? Did the way development and deployments work change? I can imagine when you're publicly traded the higher ups might suddenly care much more about being on the safe side of things and try to enforce stricter rules.

  • by nemo44x on 2/9/15, 7:36 PM

    If your company goes public and you have valuable equity but face a lockup of 6 months you can still "lock in" some price...if your company gets publicly traded options that is.

    Sell calls at the price you want to sell for the month that the lockup expires. If your shares get called away you got the price you wanted and some premium. However, you miss out on a huge gain if it goes far beyond your call level. Also, if the stock tanks in that time you keep your now less valuable shares but you got some premium.

    So, after selling calls you can take that money you made from the premium and buy puts with it at around the same price. You've created a spread here and have locked in a selling price and gave yourself some downside insurance - all for very little cost to you over all since the covered call premium paid for most, if not all of your puts. Your only risk now is that the stock goes through the roof and you miss out on some upside - but that makes sense as you've eliminated risk for very little out of pocket cost. So maybe you do this on 1/2 or 2/3 of your position or whatever you're comfortable with.

    Of course the difficulty is if you have a ton of stock and the option market for your company isn't very large and therefore illiquid.

  • by knivets on 2/9/15, 4:28 PM

    Read at first as GitHub's IPO.