Groupon IPO May Be Delayed?

I will admit that this story rather amuses me: the Groupon IPO might be delayed.

Groupon’s initial public offering is about to hit some very rough turbulence.

"The reason is that the Securities and Exchange Commission may force a postponement of the offering. The problem arises from an e-mail apparently sent last week by Groupon’s chief executive, Andrew Mason, to thousands of Groupon employees".

The thing is, you see, in the lead up to an IPO the company is supposed to be in a “quiet period”. The reason for this is that in order to do the IPO the company has prepared a great big fat document which the SEC has to review and approve. In that document should be everything the company wants to say about itself: it’s not allowed to then start adding to that with PR releases, emails, letters to the papers or anything else. The SEC just won’t allow it.

Now yes, this is hard on Groupon because half the world’s tech and financial press has been reading that IPO filing and wondering whether there’s actually an interesting business in there at all: or perhaps just an interesting way for the organisation to go bust. Hard not to be able to respond to such speculations: but fair too.

For one of the other things that this quiet period does it tell us whether a formerly private company is actually ready, in its internal culture, to go public. What management is allowed to do and say changes substantially when the company does go public: having to keep quiet for a month or two before doing so is as nothing to the restrictions on what they may do or say afterwards. And if you can’t do that are you really ready for the myriad restrictions on what you can do when public?

source: forbes.com

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Posted in: Business,IPO,Public relations