The Power of Positive Destruction

Chapter 9 No Tree Grows to the Sky

We finally hit our stride. We were constantly breaking new records, and we celebrated all of the successes. When we reached 100 million shares, we rented out a bar and hosted a party. When we hit 120 million shares, we rented out a bar and had a party. It didn’t matter that it was only two days later. At some point we could have had a party every other day because we were constantly hitting new records. Everything was great.

Going into 2008 we started preparing for our initial public offering (IPO) at a $4 billion valuation. We didn’t need to raise money, but going public had been an implied promise to our shareholders and investors. This included our employees as we gave everyone who worked at Liquidnet equity in the company. The plan was always that we were going to monetize this and share the company’s success with the people who built it.

Liquidnet was a super-hot company, and all of the investment banks wanted our business. We hired people to implement all the regulatory and reporting processes required by public companies. We also hired Lise Buyer, who had advised Google on its IPO, to advise us on ours. I don’t generally like to hire consultants, but this was an area that required specific expertise. I knew that in many respects the IPO process was deeply flawed and rife with Wall Street conflicts of interest. The bankers would have been through this process hundreds of times, but most of our management team had not done it once. We ...