iStockphoto | dny59

Marketo, a cloud-based marketing software company, debuted on the Nasdaq today under the ticker symbol MKTO at $13 a share and closed at $23.10. Its biggest shareholder is venture capital firm InterWest Partners, whose 33.3 percent stake was worth $302 million pre-sale and is now worth north of $565 million.

Tableau Software started trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol DATA. Its shares were priced yesterday at $31 and closed today $50.75. Its biggest shareholder is New Enterprise Associates, which invested a combined $29 million in three rounds between 2004 and 2010 for about 37 percent of the company.

It sold two million shares at $31 in the offering, but still has 17.6 million shares remaining, making its combined gain on Tableau, by my math, worth $955.2 million. On paper that amounts to a one-day gain of 3,194 percent.

Now are you convinced the IPO market is back?

The bigger of today’s two is Tableau Software, which specializes in data visualization. Yesterday, the company announced that the shares priced at $31, raising north of $254 million in the process.

The company will be listing on the New York Stock Exchange with the ticker symbol DATA. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are running the deal. Credit Suisse, J.P. Morgan, UBS Investment Bank, BMO Capital Markets and JMP Securities are also underwriting.

Tableau’s biggest shareholder is the venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates, which led two investment rounds for a combined $15 million, the last being a $10 million series B in 2008 in a deal led by Forest Baskett. NEA’s stake amounted to about 37 percent before the sale, worth more than $607 million at the share offering price.

Founder and chief scientist Pat Hanrahan has about 18 percent of the company, worth about $295 million at the offering price. His co-founders — Christian Chabot, chairman and CEO, and Christopher Stolte, chief development officer — have about 15 percent each, with both stakes worth north of $235 million. Meritech Capital Partners has a stake amounting to about 6.5 percent, worth more than $102 million at the offering price.

The other one going today is Marketo, the cloud-based marketing software company. Market price yesterday was at $13 a share, raising almost $79 million. It will trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol MKTO.

Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse are leading the offering. UBS, Canaccord Genuity, Raymond James and JMP Securities are also underwriting.

Marketo’s biggest shareholder is InterWest Partners, which prior to the sale had a 33.3 percent stake worth more than $302 million. Storm Ventures has a stake of a little more than 17 percent, worth $66 million. Battery Ventures, which led a $50 million Series F in 2011, has a 7 percent stake, worth about $28 million.

Following a slowdown in technology IPOs after Facebook’s offering last May, companies including microblogging service Twitter Inc., peer-to-peer lending site Lending Club Corp. and software-tools startup Atlassian are among those preparing to go public, said executives and people familiar with the matter.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Facebook’s top lawyer Ted Ullyot is leaving the social networking giant, apparently to take some time off.

Facebook disclosed the departure today. Ullyot, 45, will be officially gone in July; the search for his replacement will include internal and external candidates.

As general counsel, Ullyot has presided over a myriad of new, unusual and sometimes controversial legal issues, including managing high-stakes and complex litigation that ranged from Facebook’s battle with the Winklevoss twins, to a patent fight with Yahoo to investor disgruntlement around its initial public offering.

And, of course, over privacy issues. In many ways, given the Silicon Valley company’s pioneering role in social networking, Ullyot has had to work in a relatively undiscovered landscape, which has also attracted a great deal of scrutiny from consumers, regulators and investors.

He started in the fall of 2008, and has managed all the legal aspects of the company and built up the team from 10 when Facebook was a startup to more than 70 as a public company. In that time, Facebook has grown from 500 people to 5,000 and from 100 million to over one billion active users.

It has certainly been a ride for him, from beating back the Winklevii over their allegations related to the founding of Facebook to settling the patent dispute with Yahoo to handling the Federal Trade Commission investigation and more.

It is not clear what he will do next, but sources said he does not have another job lined up as of yet.

There’s no picture of the moment when everything changed for Kevin Systrom. But if there were, it would look something like this: A lanky, very tall, dark-haired man in his late 20s sits on a bench at the Caltrain commuter station in Palo Alto, Calif. A sepia tone and weathered patina might underscore the mood of weighty contemplation.

It was early April of last year, and Systrom was waiting for his business partner, Mike Krieger, to arrive from San Francisco. Systrom had just left Mark Zuckerberg’s nearby house and was still digesting the offer that the Facebook founder and CEO had made him: To buy Instagram, the photo-sharing app that Systrom and Krieger had launched just 18 months before. The price Zuckerberg offered was $1 billion — $300 million in cash and the rest in Facebook stock, an especially generous-seeming deal on the eve of his company’s much-anticipated initial public offering.

The offer was even more impressive given Instagram’s size and age. At the time, it had just 13 employees, operating out of a cramped space in the South Park section of San Francisco. Still, the small crew had managed to attract 30 million Apple iPhone users in just a year and a half by offering a service that allowed a person to quickly upload, prettify through the use of filters and publish images to the Web for friends to see. A version for Google’s Android mobile operating system had launched the week before, attracting another million users in a single day.

What’s more, although the app generated no revenue, it had attracted so much attention from venture capitalists that the startup had nearly closed an impressive new round of funding at a wildly high valuation of $500 million. Zuckerberg had just doubled that, leaving Systrom with a lot to think about on that train-station bench.

Click. If there ever was a money shot to take for Instagram and Systrom, that was it.

(Photo by Jonas Fredwall Karlsson, used with permission by Vanity Fair)

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Rally had raised a fair amount of venture capital funding, including a $20 million round led by Meritech Capital Partners, and $16 million from Greylock Partners before that. Last year it acquired a partner called Agile Advantage.

Agile software development is a way of working that allows for relatively short cycles, and improving on an application as you go. The idea is to keep the development work as close to business objectives as possible. Rally specializes in building cloud-based tools for managing development cycles and collaboration.

Rally’s customers include Oracle, eBay, BMC Software and Intel in the tech space; Disney and McGraw-Hill in the media segment; and McKesson, a big name in the health care world. The company’s S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission says it has nearly 169,000 paid seats in use. It reported sales of $57 million in the year ended Jan. 31, and a net loss of $10.8 million.

Deutsche Bank and Piper Jaffray are acting as lead book-running managers for the offering. Needham & Co., JMP Securities, and William Blair & Co. are acting as co-managers.

Seattle-based Tableau Software Inc. will hope to replicate the success of Splunk Inc. which has jumped 133 percent since its April 2012 debut. Tableau is seeking to raise about $150 million in an IPO that could happen in about a month.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The approval of the plan by the Securities and Exchange Commission marks an end to months of uncertainty among brokers over potential relief for losses from the social-networking company’s May 2012 initial public offering.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Xoom’s shares opened at $21 on the Nasadaq Stock Market, up 31 percent from their $16 offer price. The stock had climbed above $23 in midday trading.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Last year, several Facebook investors sued the company, arguing that Facebook — which had shared internal financial forecasts with certain analysts before the IPO — was also obligated to disclose those projections in regulatory filings.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

A new filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission appears to show that the round has swelled to $150 million. I’ve reached out to Box CEO Aaron Levie for a comment, but haven’t heard back yet.

The upward tick in funding is especially interesting now that Levie has publicly put a firm target on 2014 for Box’s inevitable IPO, an event that would follow its global expansion, which began in earnest in June with the opening of an office in Europe. Box needs the money mainly because securing the data center capacity it needs to keep its cloud humming isn’t cheap.

Anyway, to refresh your memory about that funding round: General Atlantic’s Gary Reiner, the former CIO of General Electric, joined Box’s board of directors. The Wall Street Journal reported prior to the funding announcement that Box was raising money at an implied valuation of $1.2 billion.

The expansion of the round would bring Box’s total capital raised to $312 million. And it hasn’t been all that long since Box took an $81 million strategic investment round from Salesforce.com and SAP Ventures with several venture capital participating, funds including New Enterprise Associates and Bessemer Venture Partners.

Also, there’s still the mystery of Box’s institutional investors. I heard from sources close to the deal last summer that Box had been courting some institutional investors and that at least two decided to take part. The new filing sheds no light on who they are as yet, but it would make sense. Taking institutional investments, as part of a late-stage investment, Box would be following a variant of the strategy that companies like Facebook and Workday have followed on the way to their own IPOs. It’s a good way to get to know the banks that will be selling your shares to their clients someday. The upshot of all this is that the pace of chatter about a Box IPO is only quickening and will do so all year.

Update: Box just confirmed this in a statement sent to me by a company spokesperson.

“After the initial announcement of our series E round in August 2012, some of our current venture and strategic investors made additional investments. Today we filed the official form D for the series E round, which is now closed at a total $150 million.”

So there you have it.

Sources familiar with the matter say that Violin has acquired GridIron Systems, a company that specializes in accelerating applications that run in data centers. The deal will be announced on Monday, but financial terms won’t be disclosed.

Chatter about the acquisition first emerged on the blog of Philippe Nicolas, a French expert on the storage market and head of product strategy at Scality. He wrote on Jan. 10 that GridIron had reached a deal to be acquired, but didn’t name a buyer. He estimated the purchase price at between $200 million and $300 million.

It’s Violin’s third acquisition. The last one was the assets of Gear6 in 2010, and before that, the acquisition of the original Violin Memory stream of intellectual property. Violin is taking on about 20 employees from GridIron, and will use its intellectual property in its own storage-array products. The deal brings Violin’s total headcount to about 450.

GridIron Systems was founded in 2007, and had been backed by investments from Mohr Davidow, Foundation Capital and Trinity Ventures. It had raised about $30 million in capital.

Violin was reported to have filed for an IPO in October, but did so under the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, so the related filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission aren’t available to the public. Last year, it raised about $80 million at an implied valuation of $800 million in a Series D round from GE Asset Management; Toshiba, the Japanese chip and electronics maker; and networking company Juniper Networks, as well as Highland Capital and SAP Ventures, the investment arm of German software giant SAP.

In its trading debut Thursday, the stock surged 47 percent to $11.79 on the Nasdaq Stock Market, opening well above its $8 offering price and climbing throughout the trading day.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Shares opened at $22.50 on the New York Stock Exchange Thursday, up 32 percent from its $17 offer price.

The company sold 4.5 million shares priced at $17 each in a deal that raised $76.5 million. The deal came to market with a price that topped the $13-to-$15 expected range.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Aneel Bhusri

Workday, the most-watched IPO in the tech world since Facebook, says its stock will bow in at between $24 and $26 a share, raising north of $590 million and nudging its overall valuation toward the $4 billion $5 billion mark. The disclosure came in an updated S1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. It will trade under the ticker symbol WDAY.

Workday has been on a steady march toward this moment since it took an $85 million institutional investment round last year when it was valued at a then eye-popping $2 billion.

Co-CEOs Aneel Bhusri and Dave Duffield will control about 67 percent of the proxy through a two-layered share structure that gives holders of Class B shares 10 votes to every one vote for a typical Class A shareholder.

Workday should price any day now.

Update: I updated the headline and the text to reflect Workday’s valuation as being closer to $5 billion than $4 billion.

About 50 lawsuits have been filed against Facebook, Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. and underwriters of Facebook’s May IPO, according to lawyers involved in the cases.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which invested in AppSense last year, is working with the company to help it prepare an IPO filing, along with Citigroup Inc. and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., these people said. The deal is still in its early stages, and is planned for next year, said the people, who said no pricing or valuation has yet been targeted.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Nasdaq last month proposed a $62 million, all-cash compensation package that would be split up among afflicted firms — a plan that itself was modified after an outcry over the terms of the original $40 million proposal of cash and discounted trading fees. Estimates of Wall Street’s total losses in the Facebook debut on May 18 have been put at some $500 million.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

No one authorized to speak for Yammer is talking about this. I will say that a lunch meeting I had scheduled on Tuesday in New York with Yammer co-founder Adam Pisoni was suddenly canceled because of what I was told was a “personal emergency.” It could be coincidence, but then again it might not be.

Another bit of color I’ve heard — and again it may not mean anything — is that Yammer CEO David Sacks has invitations out for a big 40th-birthday bash in Southern California this weekend, at which rapper Snoop Dogg is expected to perform. Whether or not Sacks will be celebrating the sale of his company is still uncertain, but there’s a lot about the speculative story in Bloomberg — which cites two people familiar with the talks — that makes sense.

Outwardly, Yammer has looked to be the most promising of the social enterprise software players that are not named Jive. In February, it raised $85 million in a fifth round of funding led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, at an implied valuation of about $1 billion. Meritech Capital Partners, Jeff Skoll’s Capricorn Investment Group and Khosla Ventures also participated in that round. Prior investors include Charles River Ventures, Emergence Capital, Founders Fund, the Social+Capital Partnership and US Venture Partners, and the angel investors are Bill Lee, Max Levchin and the football great Ronnie Lott.

That round of funding came on the heels of the late-2011 IPO of rival Jive, whose market capitalization as of Wednesday’s close was $1.03 billion. Lots of people got rich in that offering, especially founders Bill Lynch and Matthew Tucker, and CEO Tony Zingale.

Jive had followed a fairly specific path to going public, which Yammer could have followed, but hasn’t. For example: Before raising a $30 million funding round led by Kleiner Perkins in the summer of 2010, Jive had tapped Zingale, the veteran CEO of Mercury Interactive, who saw that company through its $4.5 billion sale to Hewlett-Packard.

Later, in early 2011, Jive added directors with public company experience to its board; then it set about making some important acquisitions, among them Proximal Labs, an “acqhire” deal; and then OfficSync, a deal that gave it crucial plug-in technology for Microsoft Office.

Yammer has done nothing like this, with one exception: Its April acquisition of the British start-up OneDrum looked an awful lot like Jive’s acquisition of OfficSync. Otherwise, there have been none of the classic pre-IPO signals from Yammer: No high-profile additions to the board, no more acquisitions, no chatter about bankers competing to lead it through the S1 filing and road-show process. When asked about his interest in doing an IPO, Sacks would, in conversations with me, tend to simply avoid the subject. A billion-dollar exit now would seem mighty attractive to Sacks and Yammer’s investors, rather than the uncertainty of an IPO in a shaky market, coupled with a head-to-head-to-head competitive slugfest with Jive and Salesforce.

Then there’s the simple matter of business challenges. Yammer is, by all accounts and its own publicly disclosed stats, having trouble converting its free users to paid status. It is quick to brag about its four million corporate users, but they’re fuzzy numbers. Many start using the service for free, experiment with it, but never turn out to be regular, daily users. Fewer still ever convert to paid status. Yammer has said in the past that its conversion rate is about 20 percent, which works out to about 800,000 paid seats. Getting companies to pony up has proven difficult. Jive doesn’t disclose the total number of seats, but it does disclose how many companies are customers: 676 as of March 31, all of them paying subscribers.

If Microsoft proves to be the buyer, then it would give the Windows and Office giant a key piece of technology to offer its enterprise customers. One big argument for the existence of the social enterprise software business is to attack Microsoft’s outdated collaboration software, SharePoint.

The players are many: Aside from Jive and Yammer, there’s Salesforce.com’s Chatter service, which tends to be strong in sales departments where the mainline CRM service is already in use. Other players include Socialcast, owned by VMware; Moxie Software and Atlassian’s HipChat are others.

Once Microsoft gets its hands on it, two things will be true: Yammer, which is generally seen as still being buggy and in need of a lot of smoothing out of its rougher edges, will need some serious investment. The problem is that, even at a $1 billion valuation, Yammer is small enough that it will disappear inside Microsoft.

The other is that the freemium business model will have to go away. With the possible exception of Skype, it’s just not in Microsoft’s DNA to offer an enterprise product for free and leave it to the users to upgrade to the paid version when it suits them. When the rubber meets the road, many customers may dump Yammer in favor of something else. Those who are serious and willing to pay will consider Jive, which would probably capitalize on the opportunity by offering special deals to customers who switch. Those who demand free will switch to something they can still get for free.

We’ll see if this deal materializes. Bloomberg said a deal could be announced as early as today.

The online travel deals site was to be one of the next Internet IPO deals led by Morgan Stanley, the bank that led Facebook’s deal. The roadshow for the Kayak deal, in which large investors get pitched on the shares, was to begin after Memorial Day, the people said. Now, that timing is uncertain, they said, as Kayak takes stock of investor confidence. Facebook shares have lost about 25 percent of their value since they started trading May 18.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The suit follows reports that analysts at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. cut their revenue forecasts on Facebook amid the investor roadshow, a change that wasn’t widely disseminated.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

That decision by the 41-year-old Facebook executive may have doomed any real chance the social-networking company had that its shares would jump when trading began — a hallmark of successful IPOs. On Tuesday, the second full day of trading, Facebook shares fell $3.03, or 8.9 percent, to $31, after falling 11 percent on Monday. Investors are blaming the downdraft on the last-moment expansion of the offering.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »