buy.com going public again

Filed in archive Venture Capital on January 30, 2005

Mike at Techdirt spots the perfect double IPO:

"Last year, we had the story of Webshots, the startup that was sold to Excite@Home for $80 million, bought back by its founders for $2.4 million and then sold again to CNET for $70 million. It looks like Scott Blum is trying to do a similar trick with Buy.com -- but instead of selling the company to another company, he's selling it to the public markets for the second time. Blum, of course, was the super high profile founder of Buy.com who was considered such a liability originally that investment bankers would only take the company public if he left. The company finally did go public, despite its massive losses and negative margins, providing Blum with a nice little profit that he used to buy the company back a year and a half later, taking it private. Now comes the news that Blum is going to take Buy.com public again, even though the company is still reporting fairly massive losses. Even as the IPO market has opened up again, one thing people have pointed out is that it still seems like companies with successful track records are the ones making it through the window. Well, now maybe even the non-profitable dot coms are going to try to go public too. This sounds familiar, doesn't it? It used to be what we called a "bubble."