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If IPOs Happen, The Bubble Will Have Truly Arrived

March 6, 2008 BY Mark Evans

BusinessWeek has a story looking at how red-hot “Web 2.0″ companies such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Slide have stayed away from doing IPOs.

While these companies – and others – have solid reasons for staying away from the public markets, it’s the lack of IPOs that has truly (and thankfully) separated this dot-com landscape from the previous dot-com boom that blew up amid a frothy environment fueled by investment banks and gullible retail investors, an over-abundance of hype, and too many business plans that weren’t business plans at all.

If you start to see a flurry of high-tech IPOs, then all those we’re-in-a-bubble advocates will have the ammunition they need to suggest that the sky is, indeed, really falling.

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  • http://www.petertdavis.com Peter Davis

    It’s more to do with Sarbox than whether or not there’s a bubble.

  • http://www.markevanstech.com Mark Evans

    Peter,

    You’re right, particularly when it comes to smaller companies given the high cost of having to comply. This explains why the LSE’s AIM exchange has done so well recently.

  • Terry Smith

    It’s the frenzy that indicates a bubble, not the IPO – if it’s just another IPO, no bubble.