Arm Holdings IPO Filing | Hacker News Reader

Arm Holdings IPO Filing

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30 pointscoloneltcb6 comments

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.

Being involved in a lawsuit with their biggest customer (Qualcomm) is not a great look. If I were an investor, I would keep a close eye.

What if anything might prevent Amazon or some other mega-cap from getting a controlling interest at the IPO?

Are mega-caps likely to be dominant buyers from the underwriters? Or will retail / pension funds be just as big.

Nothing, once it traded on the public market anyone with the capital can gain control.

The thing is it most likely not going to happen, because they would almost certainly get a better deal buying majority interest before any IPO.

> 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.

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