David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay. Let’s grade the IPO. If we think about the value of doing the IPO and doing it when they did, to me is just immense. This is an A bordering on A+ because you could argue against it that they IPOed too early before this massive expansion and perceived expansion in the market, and thus they could’ve taken less delusion had they gone public later. However, by going public when they did, and getting on the map, most people didn’t really know about Shopify out there. Certainly, in the investor community, in the finance community, but also just broadly the average person didn’t know. And then by doing it right at the cusp of the world into this D2C brand, Instagram commerce, influencer marketing, and Shopify being at the center of all of that, by being a public company, that helped also then on the other side of that by Shopify going up into the Unilevers, and the Googles and the big companies out there, being a public company certainly helped them on that, in launching Shopify Plus and that’s now a core to their business. This is a no brainer, at least a solid A in terms of what they were able to get out of, going public when they did it for me. Yup. That’s a great, great point. Then the only question is, did they make good use of the capital that they raised in the IPO and what did that allowed them to do? I don’t think there’s anything magical about it. They spent it on sales marketing, accelerated the growth of the company, subsequently have done very, very well on the investor community, obviously, and then very well with customers, too. I don’t disagree with anything you said.…

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