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."
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A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
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At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
