Going Public
Review of Uncommon Stock III: Exit Strategy by Eliot Peper
The third and final installment of the Uncommon Stock series delivered more of its trademark startup advice veiled in a suspenseful novel. Much like both books that it followed, Exit Strategy left me with more knowledge than when I started it. What surprised me was what that knowledge was. The first books were full of great bits of advice for any young entrepreneur. They covered everything from the nuts and bolts of getting venture funding to the importance of having balanced co-founder dynamics. The third book starts as the company is already established and successful. It follows the company, Moziak, through another great business hurdle: the IPO.
The book taught me a ton about the pains of undertaking an IPO like frivolous lawsuits, cross-country investor pitch tours, and maintaining company values in times of growth. But, the information that I found myself thinking about long after the book was finished was the in-depth knowledge of corporate and political corruption. Never before had it hit home the importance of banking to illegal businesses. Armies of accounting and finance professionals are, wittingly or not, employed with the task of hiding ill-gotten gains in the ocean of the global finance data. By the end of the book I found myself asking questions like, “How come algorithms like Moziak don’t exist in the real world?”
Truly, the entire book series is held together by the fact that the product being pitched, first to investor angles and then to hedge fund managers, is completely viable. There have been recent events in the banking sector that have pointed to the need for a product like Moziak. Leaked documents describe Swiss bank HSBC’s complacency towards bank accounts owned by every sort of evil-doer from African blood diamond traders to Dominican cocaine smugglers. FIFA was able to use non-profit loopholes to give and receive millions in bribes for the rights to its world cups.
It seems like there is no better time then now for founders like Mara and James to step up and disrupt these white collar crimes. Hopefully, these would-be entrepreneurs were lucky enough to have read the Uncommon Stock series so they could be one step closer to saving the world through innovation and hard work.
