This might be the best version of The One’s story. After 5 years’ hardworking, our startup has become popular in the United States. The One is a household name, it’s the first place people think of when they are furnishing their new home. Our VCs thought it’s a good point for them to exit.
After a lot of conferences and debates, we finally decided to take our company to a new level-we brought The One to the stock market, sold 20% of our stocks to the general public. The One wasrunning by a professional management team and we had Wells Fargo as our underwriter. We also published our financial status after we had more than 500 shareholders.
The private stocks sold out within 3 days. Our stocks were also traded actively via secondary exchanges. With in six months, we raised a lot of money and this provided our investors an exit. IPO also made our company more famous, we got more attention from public, thanks for the report of public media.
Going on stock market also brought us some problems. We had to give up control of our company and answer to shareholders with quarterly earnings reports. Also we had to spend much more money on our compliance costs.
