These days there are few opportunities to take a private company public. However, there is no time like the present to prepare yourself for the day – probably in a few years – when the IPO market will get started again.
If you are leading a startup, there is a good chance you have a long-term vision for building a company that scales enough to make the world a better place. Your odds of doing that are much better if you can remain as CEO after the company goes public.
Sadly, many CEOs can grow their company to the verge of an IPO but cannot run it well afterwards. Indeed, according to The Founder’s Dilemmas some 60 percent of founders do not remain CEOs following their company’s Series D investment round.
I recently spoke with an entrepreneur who has overcome that common hurdle. The CEO in question is Shlomi Ben Haim, who runs “liquid software” provider JFrog. Despite the slowing economy, JFrog – which went public in 2020 — has been growing surprisingly quickly – at 34 percent in the most recent quarter.
Here are the three strategies that have contributed to his success and that you should consider following if you aspire to lead your company to an IPO and beyond. In my book, Scaling Your Startup, I called this fourth stage of scaling Running the Marathon.
1. Partner with a strategist CFO.
When a startup begins raising capital from venture investors, it needs a chief financial officer (CFO) with experience taking a company public and communicating with investors after the IPO. While every CEO has different skills and areas where they need help, I think many of them are better off if they can collaborate with a CFO who can do that and be a business strategist.
Such a partnership is contributing to JFrog’s success. Ben Haim, a visionary CEO, and Jacob Shulman, a risk-managing CFO work effectively to strike the right balance between ambition and realism. Ben Haim told me that he is happy that Shulman — who joined JFrog as CFO in May 2018 after serving as CFO of Mellanox Technologies — is his “partner in crime.”
Ben Haim hired Shulman to collaborate on business strategy. “I was not looking for an accountant,” says Ben Haim. “I wanted someone who could read and understand the data and have credibility. I needed a partner to read the market waters, listen to analysts and peers, and help us take a controlled approach to risk.”
2. Maintain a long-term focus.
To scale a company to the point where it can go public, a leader must balance the short- and long-term. Public company CEOs must report to investors every quarter and that makes it hard to resist the temptation to focus too much on those reports.
What’s more, these days many CEOs are scrambling to deal with short-term pressures brought on by high inflation and rising interest rates. Current macroeconomic headwinds are not deterring Ben Haim. “I have experience with rapidly changing headwinds and tailwinds. I started two companies during such times — one in 2001 and JFrog in 2008 — three months before a global crisis in both cases,” he told me.
This experience focuses him on aiming at long-term goals while preserving cash. “I can identify [the beginning of an economic downturn] and did not wait for the analysts to tell the world. With $500 million in cash, we have built in resiliency. We know the market will recover,” he said.
3. Stay ahead of potential disruptors.
A founder who is running a public company must invest in the future. Ben Haim and Shulman have collaborated to keep JFrog stay ahead of potential disruptors. As Ben Haim said, “I could see the evolution years ahead of time. Every company was going to be a DevOps company. Security would be a task that developers would have to face. The next stage was IoT and connected devices.”
To realize his vision, JFrog made acquisitions. For example, in September 2021, it acquired Upswift, a connected-device management software provider, and in June 2021 JFrog acquired Vdoo, a product security firm, for about $300 million, according to Calcalist.
Ben Haim credits Shulman with helping with M&A strategies. As Shulman told me, “I am an agent of change and controlled risk. We discussed the IoT business model and set milestones we needed to achieve. [We addressed questions such as] ‘How much should we invest? How could we achieve a return on investment?'”
Follow these three strategies and you can boost your odds of taking your company public and continuing to lead it to higher ground.
By: Peter Cohan, Founder, Peter S. Cohan & Associates
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg pauses while speaking as he testifies before a joint hearing of the ... [+] Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth fell $11 billion on Thursday to $36 billion as the company’s shares plummeted a day after it reported dismal quarterly earnings. Meta shares fell 25% to $97.94 on Thursday, pushing the stock to its lowest point since December 2016. In its third quarter earnings released late Wednesday, the social media giant reported a 50% decline in profits and revenue sliding by 4%, far below analyst expectations.
To make matters worse, Meta’s virtual and augmented reality division has lost a whopping $9.4 billion this year through September 30 trying to create the metaverse. On that front, Meta appears to be failing miserably.
“Look, I get that a lot of people might disagree with this investment. But from what I can tell, I think that this is going to be a very important thing, and I think it would be a mistake for us to not focus on any of these areas, which I think are going to be fundamentally important to the future,” Zuckerberg said in the company’s earnings call on Wednesday after the U.S. stock market closed.
The stock decline knocked Zuckerberg down from the 25th richest person in the world as of market close Wednesday to the 29th richest as of market close Thursday, according to Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaire tracker.
It hasn’t been a great year for Zuckerberg. Meta stock was flying high during the pandemic and reached its peak on September 7, 2021, bumping Zuckerberg’s fortune to $136.4 billion. Since then, Meta’s stock price has cratered by 74% and Zuckerberg has lost $100 billion, nearly three-fourths of his fortune at its peak.
Beyond the losses in its metaverse unit, Meta is facing fierce competition from TikTok for ad dollars—the source of the majority of its revenue—as well as a broader advertiser pullback amid concerns about an impending recession. Adding to its advertising woes, the social network is still reeling from privacy changes made by Apple last year that make it harder for tech companies to track users across apps, which has cut into its ad revenue.
It comes as investor doubts about Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for the future grow, and revenues and profits decline. Meta’s sales shrank by 4% in the three months ending in September to $27.7bn (£24bn), while profits halved.
The fall in shares is set to wipe $78bn off the firm’s market value if the losses hold until the end of Thursday.
What’s gone wrong?
A year ago, Mark Zuckerberg declared virtual reality the next frontier to drive Facebook’s growth. But so far, there has been very little of it.The company, which also owns WhatsApp, is struggling as companies cut advertising budgets in the face of economic uncertainty, changes to Apple’s privacy settings hurt its targeted ads, and competition from rivals such as TikTok heats up.
Mr Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook at university almost two decades ago, acknowledged the firm faced “near-term challenges”.He said the company was focused on becoming more efficient and hinted at job cuts, saying the firm may be a “smaller organisation” next year.
But on a conference call stacked with sceptical analysts, he also maintained that the company was on the right path, as it invests in ways to keep people on its apps and stakes a claim in the emerging world of virtual reality, also known as the metaverse.
“There are a lot of things going on right now in the business and in the world,” he said. “We’re going to resolve each of these things… I think those who are patient and invest with us will end up being rewarded.”
Investor confidence plunged in February, when the company revealed it had lost daily users for the first time ever. Then in July, the company reported its first quarterly decline in revenue, as companies spooked by the economic outlook cut their advertising budgets.
Prior to the firm’s update, the value of Meta’s shares had fallen 60% since the start of the year, wiping hundreds of billions off the company’s value. They slid further on Thursday, after executives warned that recovery would take an improvement in the wider economy.
Analyst Debra Aho Williamson of Insider Intelligence said the company was on “shaky legs when it comes to the current state of its business”.”Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to focus his company on the future promise of the metaverse took his attention away from the unfortunate realities of today: Meta is under incredible pressure,” she said.
Meta continues to generate large profits – nearly $4.4bn in the three months ended in September – and it has also fended off a decline in users.The company said 2.93 billion people were active on one of its platforms daily in the three months ended in September, up from 2.88 billion in the quarter before.
Although the core Facebook platform is not adding users in the US or Europe, it continues to grow in other parts of the world.Despite its strengths, many investors fear the company has lost its way……
Despite a brutal selloff so far this year in the tech sector, Wall Street analysts remain cautiously optimistic about Big Tech stocks ahead of upcoming second-quarter earnings this week, with the majority of experts predicting that companies like Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet can continue to post strong profits in the long run.
Though tech stocks have been hard-hit this year (with the Nasdaq down 25%) amid surging inflation, rising interest rates and ongoing recession fears, a majority of Wall Street analysts still maintain buy ratings on Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon ahead of key earnings results this week.
Three firms reiterated buy ratings on several big names Monday: Deutsche Bank predicted solid results from Apple, Bank of America expects Facebook parent Meta to see ad revenue take a smaller hit than expected and Oppenheimer predicts “robust” growth in Amazon’s AWS cloud services business.
Analysts note that while the tech sector is already slowing down, hiring across the board amid the more challenging economic environment, after a big selloff earlier this year, valuations are now looking much more attractive.
Netflix and Tesla saw their stocks rally last week after “better than feared” results, while Snap delivered “another train wreck quarter that highlights a digital ad slowdown, Apple iOS privacy headwinds and TikTok competition further heating up,” according to Wedbush analyst Dan Ives.
While there’s been some “good and bad news” in the tech sector, “there are some encouraging signs” and investors can now buy shares in some of the biggest companies at a more attractive entry point, says Lindsey Bell, chief markets and money strategist for Ally.
Among the more than 250 combined analysts covering the five Big Tech companies reporting earnings this week—Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon—fewer than five have sell ratings—a sign of just how bullish Wall Street is on some of America’s most valuable tech companies.
Alphabet and Microsoft kick off Big Tech earnings on Tuesday. Meta reports Wednesday, Apple and Amazon on Thursday. “Investors should be selective when picking stocks within the tech sector,” says David Trainer, CEO of New Constructs. “The strongest types of stocks are the ones where cash flows are strong and valuations underestimate the company’s ability to generate cash flows in the future.”
He especially likes Google parent Alphabet, which is trading at a “much cheaper” valuation than its peers and should continue to outperform, thanks to its ability to keep innovating. Trainer is “not as confident” about Facebook parent Meta, however, questioning the company’s “ability to sustain profits,” especially as it struggles to retain users amid increased competition from the likes of TikTok. His firm also remains bullish and “big fans” of Apple, though the stock is still somewhat expensive, he adds.
All of the Big Tech stocks have seen big losses so far this year, though they have recovered somewhat in recent months. Meta has suffered the greatest losses, with its market value falling by roughly half as Facebook’s ad business continues to struggle. Amazon and Alphabet are both down roughly 25%, Microsoft more than 20% and Apple 15%.
I am a senior reporter at Forbes covering markets and business news. Previously, I worked on the wealth team at Forbes covering billionaires and their wealth.
In a single two-and-a-half-hour stretch on Jan. 25, Microsoft Corp. stock erased $156 billion of its shareholders’ money, then rebounded, recovering all of its losses and adding $74 billion. In one sense this was just another lurch in the markets’ wild ride in 2022, as investors adjust to recovering economies and the prospect of rising interest rates. But it also points to a new environment in which the most valuable U.S. tech companies are going to have to work harder to justify their trillion-dollar or near-trillion-dollar valuations.
The Big Tech companies are still doing well. The day after Microsoft’s earnings, Apple reported a quarterly performance that wildly exceeded expectations. On Feb. 1, Alphabet also beat analysts’ projections. Share prices for both companies spiked—but remain below their peaks. The way Microsoft’s white-knuckle afternoon played out is particularly illustrative of the shifting environment: At 4 p.m. New York time, it released quarterly financial results.
They exceeded analysts’ expectations, except for one crucial number: Growth slowed slightly at its lucrative Azure cloud computing business. Investors panicked, sending shares down as much as 6.8% in aftermarket trading. Shortly after 6 p.m., Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood told analysts that cloud computing growth would accelerate again in the next fiscal quarter. The stock jumped, erasing the earlier losses.
Short-term stock gyrations have limited predictive power. But the activity around Microsoft’s earnings highlighted how negatively investors are now inclined to react to slowing growth at key units, even if revenue and earnings beat expectations.
A standard way to look at how excited investors are about a particular company is to compare its share price with its expected earnings. In January 2017 the stocks of the five most valuable tech companies—Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft—traded in line with the S&P 500 as a whole, at 19 times their predicted earnings. By September 2020 that multiple for the Big Tech companies was 42, while the market as a whole traded at a 27 multiple.
Investors were rewarded. Apple shareholders enjoyed an average 43% annual return over the past five years if they reinvested all their dividends back into the stock. Microsoft, Amazon, and Google generated average returns of 38%, 28%, and 26%, respectively. Even Facebook’s relatively modest 18% outperformed the S&P 500’s average of 16%.
The lockdowns helped widen the gap between tech and everyone else, according to Kasper Elmgreen, the head of equities at Amundi SA. “The economy gets turned off, so we had an historic economic contraction that hit [vehicular] traffic, leisure, industrials, construction, financial services, and so forth hardest,” he says.
That could be changing. The Covid-19 omicron wave is receding in many places, and businesses that suffered during the pandemic could benefit more than tech companies from a renewed recovery. This could send investors looking to increase their stakes in companies they’ve spurned for the past two years while they focused on the tech giants.
“The whole case for investing in these companies and inflating their premiums was the fact that growth was scarce and they had the strongest growth prospects in the S&P 500,” says Gina Martin Adams, the chief equity strategist for Bloomberg Intelligence in New York. “As economic conditions improve, that premium will naturally deflate.”
Amid reports of labor shortages and fears of economic overheating thanks to what some view as excessive government stimulus spending, a total of 26 states are now planning to end the $300 federal unemployment supplement in order to spur hiring—here’s what analysts from Goldman Sachs expect to happen once payments stop.
Key Facts
Goldman’s analysts point out that since 25 of the states ending the benefit early only account for 29% of pandemic job losses, it’s likely that the pressures on the labor market—worker shortages and a depressed labor force participation rate—will continue until the benefits expire in every state at the beginning of September.
The analysts note that it’s too soon to say how the early end of benefits will affect official employment statistics—that insight will likely be contained in the July jobs report the Labor Department will publish in August.
That said, claims for regular state unemployment insurance benefits have fallen faster in states that have announced they will end the supplement early—the analysts say this is a “hint” that hiring will pick up once the benefits are phased out, but note that other data like the volume of job postings don’t yet support that conclusion.
The analysts say their “best guess” is that the expiring benefits will “provide a significant tailwind to hiring in the coming months,” spurring growth of more than 150,000 jobs in July and more than 400,000 jobs in September, though they note that the prediction is still uncertain.
Based on previous academic studies, the analysts estimate that a typical worker receiving regular state benefits will see those benefits drop by 50% once the $300 supplement expires in their state, and the duration of their unemployment would fall roughly 25%.
Crucial Quote
“The temporary boost in unemployment benefits . . . helped people who lost their jobs through no fault of their own and are still maybe in the process of getting vaccinated, but it’s going to expire in 90 days,” President Biden said during prepared remarks after the release of the May jobs report last week. “That makes sense.”
Big Number
$12 billion. That’s how much local economies in the 24 red states that had announced an early termination of the $300 federal supplement as of June 2 are expected to lose as a result of ending the benefit early, according to a report from Congress’ Joint Economic Committee.
Surprising Fact
On Thursday, Louisiana became the first state with a Democratic governor to announce the early expiration of the $300 supplement. The other 25 states have Republican governors.
Key Background
An emergency federal unemployment insurance supplement was first authorized in the amount of $600 per week as part of the CARES Act last year. A new supplement of $300 was authorized by executive order under President Trump after the first supplement lapsed. The $300 supplement was extended once by Congress as part of a stimulus bill last December, and again by Congress as part of President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.
I’m a breaking news reporter for Forbes focusing on economic policy and capital markets. I completed my master’s degree in business and economic reporting at New York University. Before becoming a journalist, I worked as a paralegal specializing in corporate compliance.
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Critics:
Several coronavirus relief bills have been considered by the federal government of the United States:
A vote-a-rama session started two days later after the resolution was approved, and the Senate introduced amendments in the relief package. The day after, Vice PresidentKamala Harris cast her first tie-breaking vote as vice president in order to give the Senate’s approval to start the reconciliation process, with the House following suit by voting 219–209 to agree to the Senate version of the resolution.
Additionally, the House voted on the HEROES Act on May 15, 2020, which would operate as a $3 trillion relief package, but it wasn’t considered by the Senate as Republicans said that it would be “dead on arrival”.Prior to the Georgia Senate runoffs, Biden said that the direct payments of $2,000 would be passed only if Democratic candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won; the promise of comprehensive Covid-19 relief legislation was reported as a factor in their eventual victories.On January 14, prior to being inaugurated as president, Biden announced the $1.9 trillion stimulus package.
The battery pack of a Tesla Model S is a feat of intricate engineering. Thousands of cylindrical cells with components sourced from around the world transform lithium and electrons into enough energy to propel the car hundreds of kilometers, again and again, without tailpipe emissions. But when the battery comes to the end of its life, its green benefits fade.
If it ends up in a landfill, its cells can release problematic toxins, including heavy metals. And recycling the battery can be a hazardous business, warns materials scientist Dana Thompson of the University of Leicester. Cut too deep into a Tesla cell, or in the wrong place, and it can short-circuit, combust, and release toxic fume.
That’s just one of the many problems confronting researchers, including Thompson, who are trying to tackle an emerging problem: how to recycle the millions of electric vehicle (EV) batteries that manufacturers expect to produce over the next few decades. Current EV batteries “are really not designed to be recycled,” says Thompson, a research fellow at the Faraday Institution, a research center focused on battery issues in the United Kingdom.
That wasn’t much of a problem when EVs were rare. But now the technology is taking off. Several carmakers have said they plan to phase out combustion engines within a few decades, and industry analysts predict at least 145 million EVs will be on the road by 2030, up from just 11 million last year. “People are starting to realize this is an issue,” Thompson says.
Governments are inching toward requiring some level of recycling. In 2018, China imposed new rules aimed at promoting the reuse of EV battery components. The European Union is expected to finalize its first requirements this year. In the United States, the federal government has yet to advance recycling mandates, but several states, including California—the nation’s largest car market—are exploring setting their own rules.
Complying won’t be easy. Batteries differ widely in chemistry and construction, which makes it difficult to create efficient recycling systems. And the cells are often held together with tough glues that make them difficult to take apart. That has contributed to an economic obstacle: It’s often cheaper for batterymakers to buy freshly mined metals than to use recycled materials.
Better recycling methods would not only prevent pollution, researchers note, but also help governments boost their economic and national security by increasing supplies of key battery metals that are controlled by one or a few nations. “On the one side, [disposing of EV batteries] is a waste management problem. And on the other side, it’s an opportunity for producing a sustainable secondary stream of critical materials,” says Gavin Harper, a University of Birmingham researcher who studies EV policy issues.
To jump-start recycling, governments and industry are putting money into an array of research initiatives. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has pumped some $15 million into a ReCell Center to coordinate studies by scientists in academia, industry, and at government laboratories. The United Kingdom has backed the ReLiB project, a multi-institution effort. As the EV industry ramps up, the need for progress is becoming urgent, says Linda Gaines, who works on battery recycling at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory. “The sooner we can get everything moving,” she says, “the better.
Now, recyclers primarily target metals in the cathode, such as cobalt and nickel, that fetch high prices. (Lithium and graphite are too cheap for recycling to be economical.) But because of the small quantities, the metals are like needles in a haystack: hard to find and recover.
To extract those needles, recyclers rely on two techniques, known as pyrometallurgy and hydrometallurgy. The more common is pyrometallurgy, in which recyclers first mechanically shred the cell and then burn it, leaving a charred mass of plastic, metals, and glues. At that point, they can use several methods to extract the metals, including further burning. “Pyromet is essentially treating the battery as if it were an ore” straight from a mine, Gaines says. Hydrometallurgy, in contrast, involves dunking battery materials in pools of acid, producing a metal-laden soup. Sometimes the two methods are combined.
Each has advantages and downsides. Pyrometallurgy, for example, doesn’t require the recycler to know the battery’s design or composition, or even whether it is completely discharged, in order to move ahead safely. But it is energy intensive. Hydrometallurgy can extract materials not easily obtained through burning, but it can involve chemicals that pose health risks.
And recovering the desired elements from the chemical soup can be difficult, although researchers are experimenting with compounds that promise to dissolve certain battery metals but leave others in a solid form, making them easier to recover. For example, Thompson has identified one candidate, a mixture of acids and bases called a deep eutectic solvent, that dissolves everything but nickel.
Both processes produce extensive waste and emit greenhouse gases, studies have found. And the business model can be shaky: Most operations depend on selling recovered cobalt to stay in business, but batterymakers are trying to shift away from that relatively expensive metal. If that happens, recyclers could be left trying to sell piles of “dirt,” says materials scientist Rebecca Ciez of Purdue University.
The ideal is direct recycling, which would keep the cathode mixture intact. That’s attractive to batterymakers because recycled cathodes wouldn’t require heavy processing, Gaines notes (although manufacturers might still have to revitalize cathodes by adding small amounts of lithium). “So if you’re thinking circular economy, [direct recycling] is a smaller circle than pyromet or hydromet.”
In direct recycling, workers would first vacuum away the electrolyte and shred battery cells. Then, they would remove binders with heat or solvents, and use a flotation technique to separate anode and cathode materials. At this point, the cathode material resembles baby powder.
So far, direct recycling experiments have only focused on single cells and yielded just tens of grams of cathode powders. But researchers at the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory have built economic models showing the technique could, if scaled up under the right conditions, be viable in the future.
To realize direct recycling, however, batterymakers, recyclers, and researchers need to sort out a host of issues. One is making sure manufacturers label their batteries, so recyclers know what kind of cell they are dealing with—and whether the cathode metals have any value. Given the rapidly changing battery market, Gaines notes, cathodes manufactured today might not be able to find a future buyer. Recyclers would be “recovering a dinosaur. No one will want the product.”
Another challenge is efficiently cracking open EV batteries. Nissan’s rectangular Leaf battery module can take 2 hours to dismantle. Tesla’s cells are unique not only for their cylindrical shape, but also for the almost indestructible polyurethane cement that holds them together.
Engineers might be able to build robots that could speed battery disassembly, but sticky issues remain even after you get inside the cell, researchers note. That’s because more glues are used to hold the anodes, cathodes, and other components in place. One solvent that recyclers use to dissolve cathode binders is so toxic that the European Union has introduced restrictions on its use, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency determined last year that it poses an “unreasonable risk” to workers.“In terms of economics, you’ve got to disassemble … [and] if you want to disassemble, then you’ve got to get rid of glues,” says Andrew Abbott, a chemist at the University of Leicester and Thompson’s adviser.
To ease the process, Thompson and other researchers are urging EV- and batterymakers to start designing their products with recycling in mind. The ideal battery, Abbott says, would be like a Christmas cracker, a U.K. holiday gift that pops open when the recipient pulls at each end, revealing candy or a message. As an example, he points to the Blade Battery, a lithium ferrophosphate battery released last year by BYD, a Chinese EV-maker. Its pack does away with the module component, instead storing flat cells directly inside. The cells can be removed easily by hand, without fighting with wires and glues.
The Blade Battery emerged after China in 2018 began to make EV manufacturers responsible for ensuring batteries are recycled. The country now recycles more lithium-ion batteries than the rest of the world combined, using mostly pyro- and hydrometallurgical methods.
Nations moving to adopt similar policies face some thorny questions. One, Thompson says, is who should bear primary responsibility for making recycling happen. “Is it my responsibility because I bought [an EV] or is it the manufacturer’s responsibility because they made it and they’re selling it?” In the European Union, one answer could come later this year, when officials release the continent’s first rule. And next year a panel of experts created by the state of California is expected to weigh in with recommendations that could have a big influence over any U.S. policy.
Recycling researchers, meanwhile, say effective battery recycling will require more than just technological advances. The high cost of transporting combustible items long distances or across borders can discourage recycling. As a result, placing recycling centers in the right places could have a “massive impact,” Harper says. “But there’s going to be a real challenge in systems integration and bringing all these different bits of research together.”
There’s little time to waste, Abbott says. “What you don’t want is 10 years’ worth of production of a cell that is absolutely impossible to pull apart,” he says. “It’s not happening yet—but people are shouting and worried it will happen.
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Photo: Getty Images
