Buy.com To Go Public For The Second Time
from the rebounds dept
Last year, we had the story of Webshots, the startup that was sold to Excite@Home for $80 million, bought back by its founders for $2.4 million and then sold again to CNET for $70 million. It looks like Scott Blum is trying to do a similar trick with Buy.com -- but instead of selling the company to another company, he's selling it to the public markets for the second time. Blum, of course, was the super high profile founder of Buy.com who was considered such a liability originally that investment bankers would only take the company public if he left. The company finally did go public, despite its massive losses and negative margins, providing Blum with a nice little profit that he used to buy the company back a year and a half later, taking it private. Now comes the news that Blum is going to take Buy.com public again, even though the company is still reporting fairly massive losses. Even as the IPO market has opened up again, one thing people have pointed out is that it still seems like companies with successful track records are the ones making it through the window. Well, now maybe even the non-profitable dot coms are going to try to go public too. This sounds familiar, doesn't it? It used to be what we called a "bubble."
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Floating on Money
One of the points on the tour is the multi-multi-multi million dollar ocean side home and multi-multi-multi million dollar yacht sitting next to it "owned by the buy.com founder and owner". Name of the yacht? ".com"
[ link to this | view in thread ]