Spencer Rascoff, the serial entrepreneur behind Zillow, Hotwire, and Pacaso, is helping fuel the SPAC boom on Wall Street with the IPO of blank-check company Supernova.
The special purpose acquisition company hit the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday and raised $350 million with 35 million shares priced at $10 per share. Supernova is still exploring its merger options, but Rascoff said its target will likely be something within the tech industry.
"We'll be looking for companies worth between about $1 and $5 billion dollars," Rascoff told Cheddar. "It could be in a variety of areas within tech. It could be B2B SAAS. It could be e-commerce, adtech, direct-to-consumer. So we're casting our net pretty wide."
Supernova is just the latest in a string of SPAC offerings this year that is quickly becoming one of the most popular routes to the public market.
Rascoff said there are multiple benefits to choosing a SPAC instead of a traditional IPO.
"One of them is the price discovery," he said. "When you publicly list in a traditional IPO, on average tech companies now trade up 43 percent by the end of the first day. So they're leaving a huge amount of money on the table when they go public traditionally."
Another is speed, simplicity, and mentorship.
"A traditional IPO process takes almost a year," Rascoff said. "There's a lot of market risk and complexity, but if you go public by merging into a SPAC it's just a matter of a couple of weeks."
He also touted Supernova's lineup of experienced entrepreneurs and managers, including ex-Blackstone executive Robert Reid, Michael Clifton of The Carlyle Group, and hedge fund manager Alexander Klabin.
The appeal for investors is "optionality," he said. They invest based on the experience of the people behind the SPAC, but then they get a chance to basically bail out once the merger company is announced.
"SPAC investors are drawn to SPACs because for them it's a way to get sort of an early in on a potential IPO," he said. "For example, the investors that bought into the Supernova IPO are essentially betting that my team and I are going to go and identify a great target and merge into that company or have that company merge into us, and therefore they'll end up with sort of a toehold in that newly public company."
A big-screen adaptation of the anime “Chainsaw Man” has topped the North American box office, beating a Springsteen biopic and “Black Phone 2.” The movie earned $17.25 million in the U.S. and Canada this weekend. “Black Phone 2” fell to second place with $13 million. Two new releases, the rom-com “Regretting You” and “Springsteen — Deliver Me From Nowhere,” earned $12.85 million and $9.1 million, respectively. “Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc” is based on the manga series about a demon hunter. It's another win for Sony-owned Crunchyroll, which also released a “Demon Slayer” film last month that debuted to a record $70 million.
The Federal Aviation Administration says flights departing for Los Angeles International Airport were halted briefly due to a staffing shortage at a Southern California air traffic facility. The FAA issued a temporary ground stop at one of the world’s busiest airports on Sunday morning soon after U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy predicted that travelers would see more flights delayed as the nation’s air traffic controllers work without pay during the federal government shutdown. The hold on planes taking off for LAX lasted an hour and 45 minutes and didn't appear to cause continued problems. The FAA said staffing shortages also delayed planes headed to Washington, Chicago and Newark, New Jersey on Sunday.
Boeing workers at three Midwest plants where military aircraft and weapons are developed have voted to reject the company’s latest contract offer and to continue a strike that started almost three months ago. The strike by about 3,200 machinists at the plants in the Missouri cities of St. Louis and St. Charles, and in Mascoutah, Illinois, is smaller in scale than a walkout last year by 33,000 Boeing workers who assemble commercial jetliners. The president of the International Association of Machinists says Sunday's outcome shows Boeing hasn't adequately addressed wages and retirement benefits. Boeing says Sunday's vote was close with 51% of union members opposing the revised offer.
