PE vs. Direct Public Offering & OTC Markets
First of all, excuse my lack of understanding in the PE industry. But I am genuinely curious.
Not sure if everyone is up to date on this, but all the major US exchanges from NYSE to Nasdaq are aggressively vamping up their direct listing services (DPO). On top of that OTCMKTS group seems to be growing pretty fast, targeting moderately big mom & pop style firms with couple million dollars in EBITDA to go "public" with them. What these 2 trends look like to me is that these exchanges are now trying to compete (perhaps unwittingly) with growth equity and venture capital funds.
What DPO offers is a much faster and cheaper alternative to raising capital, bringing down many barriers of doing a traditional IPO. This seems to me would eat away a bit of "market share" away from late stage VC funds (Why would start-ups want to deal with VCs when they can just go public without much hassle?). After all both Spotify and Dropbox pulled off DPOs.
Now the OTCMKTS: My understanding of the PE industry is that besides the big names, there are lots of regional growth equity funds run by maybe a dozen people or so that solely focuses on small local mom & pop style businesses (You know the kind of funds found by some former big PE employee who wanted to go back to his hometown and start his own shop). Now if all of a sudden these small businesses started entertaining the idea of going public, then I feel the consequences would be serious and not necessarily favorable for these small PE shops.
Of course, I understand that there are multiple stages in a company's lifespan. And VC and growth equity funds vs. DPOs and OTC Market listings will probably serve different stages. But I'm wondering about what the actual PE people think about this topic.
Could this be an existential crisis? Is it too soon to tell? Will the market eventually sort itself out? What other changes do you anticipate? How gradual will this "supposed" change be?