Should a well-funded startup have proceeded with its long-planned IPO—or was selling out the way to go?
In this week’s Fortune Tech Debate, Erin Griffith and Robert Hackett debate Cisco’s eleventh-hour acquisition of AppDynamics.
AppDynamics was planning to list its shares on Nasdaq today to become the first tech IPO of 2017. $3.7 billion from Cisco (CSCO) sounded like a better deal. And why not? Griffith asks. After all, going public can be a painful process and this is a good deal for AppDynamics’ investors.
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Hackett disagrees. There is a pent-up demand for another tech startup IPO, and this deal takes a tech unicorn off the market before it ever arrived. People now have no idea how to adequately value the latest generation of IPO-bound startups. AppDynamics going public would have helped. “And the Dow just hit 20,000,” he adds.
Check out the video for the full debate.