David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…That went well enough that we’re hearing rumors Slack is going to do a direct listing here in the near future. There could be two things going on. One is, they feel that their ability to raise cash right now is on really favorable terms so it’s great to get that cash into the company for an unknown purpose. The other is, maybe they’re gearing up for some serious spend and they’re going to branch out into something that requires a lot of new cash the same way that Stitch Fix used a lot of their cash from their IPO to actually start retail brands that are first-party brands. I’m not sure that this international expansion is interesting because it’s growing really fast from a user perspective because they actually started caring about that in 2016 whereas they were very domestically focused until then. But they’re really not monetizing any significance internationally, so it could be to spend aggressively on bringing advertisers into their international funnel, but it’s honestly, a little puzzling. I agree as well. This all would had to be in the works long before the Lyft IPO but the only reason I can think of is just to be conservative as well and make sure things go well because DPOs are still relatively unproven. But again, if you don’t need to cash, which to be clear, Lyft and Uber need the cash and we’ll talk about that on the Uber episode but if you don’t need the cash and companies are [...] so much in the private markets, DPO really seems the way to go. There’s no lock up period, you’re not deluding yourself, you’re not selling more of the company, had a lot of advantages. You can tell I’m at the very Barry McCarthy school of thought here. Yeah. We’ve seen one DPO and here we are now, we’re looking at every deal going, “Why not DPO? Why not DPO?” Look, they did the standard thing and they did it pretty well. I think it’s not just because Spotify did it; that’s the thing that everyone feels like is a one of two options they can pursue now.…

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