This week, I had a chance to meet up with Frank Slootman. ?In 2007, he took Data Domain public and then sold the company for $2.4 billion in 2009 to EMC (NYSE:EMC).? He then went on to be a venture partner at Greylock, which has backed companies like Pandora (NYSE:P), Groupon (Nasdaq:GRPN) and LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD).
He��s also the CEO of ServiceNow, a fast-growing cloud company, which I suspect will go public at some point.
Slootman sees the current market volatility as a big problem for IPOs.
To deal with this, companies are trying to find ways to compress the whole ��roadshow�� process, Slootman says.? Traditionally, the process takes anywhere from two to three weeks.? But in today��s markets, that can be an eternity.
As a result, Slootman thinks roadshows will now scale down to a week or so.? This may involve visiting only a few cities like San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles.? And for the most part, a company will skip Europe or Asia.? In fact, this was the case with Imperva (Nasdaq:IMPV), which priced its IPOon Tuesday and saw a 33% gain even with the Dow off nearly 400 points (Slootman is on the board of the company).
Interestingly enough, more companies are doing pre-deal roadshows, which means visiting mutual funds and other institutions even before the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
For the next year, Slootman, who says he��s no expert at forecasting markets, says his hunch is that we��ll continue to see ��short bursts�� of activity.
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