For the past four years, Red Herring has given an overview of trends shaping the IPO market for technology companies by ranking the top 25 IPOs, VC firms, and investment banks of the previous year in its Going Public supplement. This year there is not much activity to report.
This article appears in the June 15, 2001, issue of Red Herring magazine.
For each of the past four years, Red Herring has given an overview of the trends shaping the IPO market for technology companies by ranking the top 25 IPOs, venture capital firms, and investment banks of the previous year in its Going Public supplement. Toward the same goal, Going Public has also included a collection of supporting feature articles analyzing the state of startup financing. But we all know what happened last spring: the IPO window slammed shut. And of course when that happened, VC funding and mergers-and-acquisitions deal-making hit the skids.
In other words, there's not all that much activity to report right now. So this year, instead of a separately bound supplement full of articles, we are presenting our annual top 25 lists in the magazine itself and on RedHerring.com.
Predictably, most of the big technology deals of 2000 took place before the market correction last spring. But the lists themselves can help tell the story of last year's markets even after the fall, and hint at what we can expect for the rest of 2001. Benchmark Capital, for example, which made its reputation and landed in the No. 1 spot in our top venture firms for 1998, in large part on the strength of its e-commerce investments, is off the VC list altogether this year. On the banking list, Salomon Smith Barney, the telecom specialist that fell in standing as the Internet deals it eschewed became bigger and bigger, is back up to No. 3, from No. 11 last year, now that the Internet bubble has burst.
One final note: don't let Going Public's hiatus fool you into thinking that nothing's going on in the industries it traditionally covers. In particular, despite the shutdown of the IPO market, there's a huge amount of activity in the banking industry, both investment and commercial. Stay tuned for our special look at banking in the 21st century in October.
Write to debbie.gravitz@redherring.com
0Going public: IPO review for 2000
The top 25 VC firms of 2000
The top 25 IPOs of 2000