Going Public

Dakin Campbell has delivered a meticulously reported history of a stock market revolution. He deftly traces the triumph of giants like Apple selling shares to the public, how innovators threatened Wall Street and how the investment banks fought back. He makes you feel how enticing the hunt for unicorns has been for each new class of investor, while tracing the scams that arose to relieve these naifs of their money. --Jesse Eisinger, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and author of The Chickenshit Club Dakin Campbell has written the definitive account of that most crucial and nailbiting of days in a company's history: their IPO. Expertly and engagingly written, GOING PUBLIC reveals what goes on behind the scenes when the world's best-known companies comes to market, and how that is evolving. --Liam Vaughan, author of Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, A Global Manhunt and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History For thousands of years, dating back at least to the time of the Romans, investors have acquired and swapped stakes in private entities seeking new sources of funding. In GOING PUBLIC, Dakin Campbell skillfully illuminates this often arcane process, its history, its importance, its perils, and most crucially its dramatic transformation in the pressurized board rooms and c-suites of modern Silicon Valley. The result is a rollicking, behind-the-scenes tale, populated by big personalities, pioneering technologists, and storied tech companies as they make the momentous, heady, hazardous leap of an initial public offering. It's a valuable, gripping read that will delight anyone interested in the thermodynamics of business innovation and financial markets. GOING PUBLIC will change the way you understand who profits from the technological revolutions coursing through the American economy, how they profit, and where it is all heading. --Felix Gillette, writer for Bloomberg Businessweek and author of It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO In GOING PUBLIC, Dakin Campbell expertly elucidates the wisdom, as well as the flaws, in the way the big Wall Street investment banks raise equity capital for companies all across the world; Campbell then traces how innovation is starting to break the hammerlock hold that Wall Street has had on that process for decades, giving some hope to both issuers and retail investors that the rigged game finally may be changing for the better. --William D. Cohan, a Vanity Fair writer and author of Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon With amazingly detailed reportage, GOING PUBLIC takes you inside the rooms where some of the biggest tech IPOs -- from Google to Airbnb -- were forged. This deeply-researched book is essential reading on the nexus between Wall Street and Silicon Valley that determines who gets rich and who gets ripped off when companies list their shares. --Jack Farchy, co-author of The World for Sale