Where Are All The Corporate Development People? And What The FTC Is Telling Us...

Good morning everyone…

Before I get started I wanted to share this photo that obviously makes me mad and sad. It is Elisha (who is unmasked) being asked by NYPD to stop ‘protesting’ (to not wear the flag). Being a cop is hard, but things are upside down right now as pro Hamas rallies abuse Americans and their privileges while Americans who are standing up get shut down. You can go to Elisha’s Twitter feed to watch the whole video.

Onward to a chart that says a lot about the public and PRIVATE markets right now…

The Mega Cap technology stocks are back at all-time highs. The IPO class of 2020 onward is just peaking into positive territory after nearly 4 years.

Indexes are market cap weighted so that matters a LOT, but so do profits.

Here are the top ten holdings in the IPO ETF (Koyfin has a great feature that shows all the holdings):

The companies leading the IPO index on this recent rally are mostly fintech and the valuations are $30 billion and below.

Yesterday, The FTC shit down the $20 billion merger of Figma and Adobe. I will share some more thoughts on that tomorrow because there is a lot to read into it and a new array of unintended consequences to think about. For today, it is just another reason in why the current and next crop of IPO’s have to get it done themselves. That is… build a great business and not count on any help from above.

They will also need to build by corporate development themselves, not just rely on organic growth. Of course the ZIRP bubble attracted most corporate development people into venture capital so that muscle needs to be relearned and the talent pool replaced. If I was 20 years younger, this is the job I would be begging for at the best late stage companies and new IPO’s.

Sam explains in more detail something I have been explaining to founders that we have backed and back today since the bubble peaked and popped in late 2021…

More tomorrow…

Have a great day.