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ANot long ago, if you were a young, brash technologist with a world-conquering start-up idea, there was a good chance you spent much of your waking life working toward a single business milestone: taking your company public.
BThough luminaries of the tech industry have always expressed skepticism and even hostility toward the finance industry, tech's dirty secret was that it looked to Wall Street and the ritual of a public offering for affirmation --- not to mention wealth.
CBut something strange has happened in the last couple of years: The initial public offering of stock has become déclassé. For start-up entrepreneurs and their employees across Silicon Valley, an initial public offering is no longer a main goal. Instead, many founders talk about going public as a necessary evil to be postponed as long as possible because it comes with more problems than benefits.
D"If you can get $200 million from private sources, then yeah, I don't want my company under the scrutiny of the unwashed masses who don't understand my business," said Danielle Morrill, the chief executive of Mattermark, a start-up that organizes and sells information about the start-up market. "That's actually terrifying to me."
ESilicon Valley's sudden distaste for the I.P.O. --- rooted in part in Wall Street's skepticism of new tech stocks --- may be the single most important psychological shift underlying the current tech boom. Staying private affords start-up executives the luxury of not worrying what outsiders think and helps them avoid the quarterly earnings treadmill.
FIt also means Wall Street is doing what it failed to do in the last tech boom: using traditional metrics like growth and profitability to price companies. Investors have been tough on Twitter, for example, because its user growth has slowed. They have been tough on Box, the cloud-storage company that went public last year, because it remains unprofitable. And the e-commerce company Zulily, which went public last year, was likewise punished when it cut its guidance for future sales.
GScott Kupor, the managing partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and his colleagues said in a recent report that despite all the attention start-ups have received in recent years, tech stocks are not seeing unusually high valuations. In fact, their share of the overall market has remained stable for 14 years, and far off the peak of the late 1990s.
HThat unwillingness to cut much slack to young tech companies limits risk for regular investors. If the bubble pops, the unwashed masses, if that's what we are, aren't as likely to get washed out.
IPrivate investors, on the other hand, are making big bets on so-called unicorns --- the Silicon Valley jargon for start-up companies valued at more than a billion dollars. If many of those unicorns flop, most Americans will escape unharmed, because losses will be confined to venture capitalists and hedge funds that have begun to buy into tech start-ups, as well as tech founders and their employees.
JThe reluctance --- and sometimes inability --- to go public is spurring the unicorns. By relying on private investors for a longer period of time, start-ups get more runway to figure out sustainable business models. To delay their entrance into the public markets, firms like Airbnb, Dropbox, Palantir, Pinterest, Uber and several other large start-ups are raising hundreds of millions, and in some cases billions, that they would otherwise have gained through an initial public offering.
K"These companies are going public, just in the private market," Dan Levitan, the managing partner of the venture capital firm Maveron, told me recently. He means that in many cases, hedge funds and other global investors that would have bought shares in these firms after an I.P.O. are deciding to go into late-stage private rounds. There is even an oxymoronic term for the act of obtaining private money in place of a public offering: It's called a "private I.P.O."
LThe delay in I.P.O.s has altered how some venture capital firms do business. Rather than waiting for an initial offering, Maveron, for instance, says it now sells its stake in a start-up to other, larger private investors once it has made about 100 times its initial investment. It is the sort of return that once was only possible after an I.P.O.
MBut there is also a downside to the new aversion to initial offerings. When the unicorns do eventually go public and begin to soar --- or whatever it is that fantastical horned beasts tend to do when they're healthy --- the biggest winners will be the private investors that are now bearing most of the risk.
NIt used to be that public investors who got in on the ground floor of an initial offering could earn historic gains. If you invested $1,000 in Amazon at its I.P.O. in 1997, you would now have nearly $250,000. If you had invested $1,000 in Microsoft in 1986, you would have close to half a million. Public investors today are unlikely to get anywhere near such gains from tech I.P.O.s. By the time tech companies come to the market, the biggest gains have already been extracted by private backers.
OJust 53 technology companies went public in 2014, which is around the median since 1980, but far fewer than during the boom of the late 1990s and 2000, when hundreds of tech companies went public annually, according to statistics maintained by Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida. Today's companies are also waiting longer. In 2014, the typical tech company hitting the markets was 11 years old, compared with a median age of seven years for tech I.P.O.s since 1980.
POver the last few weeks, I've asked several founders and investors why they're waiting; few were willing to speak on the record about their own companies, but their answers all amounted to "What's the point?"
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write the correct letter in boxes 28–31 on your answer sheet.
28.How much funds would you gain by now, if you had invested 1000$ in the Amazon in 1997?
29.Nowadays founders talk about going public as a:
30.In which time period was the biggest number of companies going public?
31.According to the text, which of the following is true
Complete the sentences below.
Write ONLY ONE WORD from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 32–36 on your answer sheet.
32. Skepticism was always expected by the of tech industry.
33. The new aversion to initial offerings has its .
34. Selling shares on a secondary market is considered a mechanism.
35. Workers' compensation might be an .
36. The public investors who failed to participate in the next big thing might be the ones wearing the .
Do the following statements agree with the information in the IELTS reading text? In boxes 37–40 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
37.Private investors are bearing most of the risk.
38.Not many investors were willing to speak on the record.
39.The typical tech company hitting the markets in 1990s was 5 years old.
40.Marc Andreessen, the firm's co-founder, expressed amazement with divergency in how investors treat public.
