Soon Direct Listings Will Raise Money
Also mini-tenders, podcasts and narrative violations.
Programming note: Money Stuff will be off tomorrow and Friday, back on Monday. Happy Thanksgiving!
One high-level way to think about direct listings is that they are a way for a company to go public without an initial public offering. Instead of hiring bankers to sell new shares to the public, the company announces “we’re public now,” and after that anyone who owns the stock can sell it on the stock exchange. One day the stock is not public and hard to trade, the next day it is public and listed on the exchange; there is just a change in status, with no big intervening transaction. A direct listing, in this view, is quiet, uneventful, boring, not a major milestone in the life of a company but an administrative change that makes trading easier for the company’s investors.