Ben T. Smith IV, a longtime Silicon Valley executive and currently head of the Communications, Media and Technology practice at Kearney, speaks to Global Finance about the post-SVB venture capital industry and the pace of innovation.
Many of the world's richest countries are also the world's smallest: the pandemic and the global economic slowdown barely made a dent in their huge wealth.
Global Finance editor Andrea Fiano interviews Ásgeir Jónsson, Central Bank Governor of Iceland during Global Finance's World's Best Bank Awards at the National Press Club in Washington, DC on October 15th.
Is the technology share party over for investors? Either the market is getting frothy, or investment bankers are having a hard time pricing IPOs of fast-growing companies that are making big losses.
Data-warehousing cloud platform Snowflake jumped 112% in its spectacular first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange on September 16. At $3.4 billion, it was the largest IPO of the year to date, and the biggest software IPO ever—more than double that of Dell-backed VMware, which raised just under $1 billion in 2007, according to Renaissance Capital.
“First-day pops are fine, but only a select few get those allocations,” says William K. Smith, CEO of Renaissance. Snowflake was the twelfth IPO this year to return 100% on its first day, he says. Only three are now trading above their first-day close. Priced at $120 a share (up from an original range of $75 to $85), Snowflake opened at $245 and quickly rose above $300 before settling just under $254 on its debut day, giving it a market cap of $70 billion. Bookrunners were Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and seven others.