Investment managers who expected the Square IPO to settle the debate on high private equity valuations have been, so far at least, thoroughly disappointed. Square, Inc. went public on November 17 at just $9 per share and opened debate in a venture community wary of high valuations on whether or not investment terms can compensate for high prices. In other words, do special investor provisions designed to protect late round investors from frothy PE valuations do more harm than good? In our last post on IPOs, we discussed the current imbalance between the public and private markets, in which an exuberance of private equity capital has driven up private valuations and created a dislocation between the privately established value of the firm and the publicly achieved value available at IPO. As a consequence of this phenomenon, IPO activity fell to new lows in the third quarter, as 16% of IPOs downsized their debuts. Square is one of a growing number of companies resorting to equity protections in order to attract late-stage investors, often at the expense of employees and earlier investors.
