Scott Dorsey: evaluation

Transcript context

…You were getting there. Yes, we were 48 million in revenue. We were profitable and we were just starting to kind of reach the enterprise space. We were extraordinarily capital efficient. So the fundraising that you referenced is all accurate but actually can be a little deceiving because each of those rounds was a mix of primary and secondary capital. So we often had a secondary component to our fundraising to provide founders, employees and early investors an opportunity to take a little bit of money off the table along the way and I was so grateful we did that actually because especially because of how we bootstrapped the business and how our three cofounders worked for kind of a very long period of time without paying ourselves, having an opportunity to take a little bit of money off the table along the way was powerful because it just allowed us to sleep on at night knowing that we had some level of financial security for our family and we’d be able to send our kids to college and all those good things. But then it just got us hungry to really want to take the business a distance and make sure we didn’t prematurely sell the business. So what was interesting is when we filed in December of ’07, we had only raised 6 million in primary capital and we had nearly as much in the balance sheet. So we had been extraordinarily capital efficient up to that point. So we filed to go public in December of ’07. The public equity market just fell apart in early ’08 and we actually stayed on file all of ’08 and ultimately decided to pull the IPO in early ’09 and that’s a whole another story I’d be happy to jump into. But I would say it was that timeframe where we started reaching up into the enterprise and then the nature of our business was shifting. We started building more professional services capability and the fundamentals of the business started shifting and in addition to the equity markets not being very favorable, it actually was a huge blessing for us because it gave us a chance to stay private, bring more capital in the business, and kind of recalibrate toward the enterprise and it was much easier to do that as a private company. That’s where I wanted to go next here, kind of leading up to so you filed to go public in December of 2007, and this was the days before the JOBS Act which is hard to imagine now that, well, easy because we all lived through it but your perspective was out there in the public domain from December of 2007. Well, still to this day but until May of 2009 you were on file and all your competitors could come read your S1 and see all your financials, and you ultimately didn’t go public then I assume because of the financial crisis in large part. There were no IPOs happening. What was that like?…

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