SpaceX (SPCX) is finally off to the races and publicly trading after its historic IPO on Friday, June 12.
Nasdaq (NDAQ) President Nelson Griggs sits down with Market Catalysts Host Julie Hyman and Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi to discuss the lessons his company has learned from Facebook's — now Meta Platforms (META) — own IPO in 2012.
And I've heard a lot of people hearken back to the Facebook IPO. I know it was a long time ago, but I'm curious if you can like give us sort of a behind the scenes of what you guys had to do, what boxes you had to check in advance of today to make absolutely sure that it was going to be smooth. and then like what does success look like?
We've done an enormous amount of work uh since Facebook. There's been uh several thousand IPOs on Nasdaq, the largest direct listening of all time in Coinbase. So, I think we we have re-engineered the the entire system. But that was done in process with our partners, the lead banks who look to us to provide a couple things. They start off by saying, they have to have the right infrastructure, the right capacity to exercise any sort of deal and they are very, very comfortable. We we test in orders of magnitude of the largest deal we've ever had. So there's the technology underpinning the process. But then they rely on us mostly for incredibly detailed uh specific data on order flow every given second so they can communicate with their clients to make sure they're fully informed about where the deal is. So ultimately when they have this initial pricing, uh the stock open for pricing, which is a usually about a three-hour process, they feel good that they've they've kind of, you know, done this massive trade. There's some stability where the price may be, although we certainly expect some some volatility after the price opens. And then the last is the human uh oversight. So we do have uh significant amount of communication with the entire street today, primarily Morgan Stanley, there's a a whole team that's communicating with them. So they rely on us for technology, transparency, and then also the human oversight. And as we've done this year alone, seven of the top 10 IPOs in market. We've had again that last 10 year, five years we've had uh the seven of the top 10 IPOs. They've gotten very excited and comfortable with our process.
Nelson, um I know again, as you pointed out, it's the banks that figure out where the stock should trade, right? And it's people in the market. But I'm just curious, you know, does it matter where the stock opens? Does it matter where it closes? Like how closely are you tracking all that stuff?
Well, I I I think when you look at market momentum, it can certainly be helpful to have an IPO shareholders on that day who decided to allocate capital into the IPO, having a good pricing outcome on day one, probably helps more the long-term, um I'd say excitement around the IPO market. So from that perspective, yes, it's important in a company though, their journey, uh this is obviously a company that that uh they are building for decades to come. The vision is truly incredible and remarkable. So a day one pricing is not something that they're going to set their their future on, but again, it does help to continue momentum in the market. And we have a very, very diversified pipeline of companies looking to go in in July, and then again as as the year progresses. So, I'd say that's that's what probably it matters most.