I work at a small company. We're 3 years old, up to 160 people. Not a start up anymore, but we were within living memory.
As soon as our series A started the CEO disappeared. Because he was just constantly meeting investors. We closed that and another round and I have not seen him on the engineering side of the business since. He's not lazy and he gets it. We spent a lot of time talking about clients, issues, roadmaps etc. Until investors just absorbed 120% of his time.
I wonder how much worse it must have been for AIM senior execs over the last few years. How can any business operate like this? Least of all one in a dynamic, competitive environment with complex mixes of tech, people, politics etc...
Series A is pretty early to disappear, unless said CEO’s end goal is to just become an investor. Series B and beyond can definitely take a lot of customer time and fundraising, but a well-balanced product-minded CEO can typically have medium- to high-touch relationships with a core of 30 to 60 employees.
> Are mega-caps likely to be dominant buyers from the underwriters?
Underwriters will typically take the highest price there will be no preference for the "mega-caps". Underwriters float stocks every day, they need to keep happy their core investors who make every other deal happen - retail / pension funds. It would probably even be preferable, if there was demand from Amazon or some other mega-cap to give them 0 in the float and then they can bid up the price in the open market and make everyone who is allocated in the IPO richer.
~20% of the shares will be in the IPO, even if someone buys every share publicly available in the IPO they wont have a controlling interest.
As soon as our series A started the CEO disappeared. Because he was just constantly meeting investors. We closed that and another round and I have not seen him on the engineering side of the business since. He's not lazy and he gets it. We spent a lot of time talking about clients, issues, roadmaps etc. Until investors just absorbed 120% of his time.
I wonder how much worse it must have been for AIM senior execs over the last few years. How can any business operate like this? Least of all one in a dynamic, competitive environment with complex mixes of tech, people, politics etc...