Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal. And today we have three guests who are actually really two guests at a time because we're sort of doing a hallway conversation style podcast. That was actually some of the original spirit behind some of the original podcasts. And we thought it'd be great to share some of our internal conversations around some of the recent news around Square, what that means for IPOs in general,

and just thinking more broadly, not just specifically about those companies and the IPOs,

but more broadly about the nuances between public and private valuations and what it all means

and how to make sense of it moving forward.

To help us have that conversation, which actually did happen, and so I'm just bringing

the people that I had some internal conversations with yesterday, are Nicole, who joined A6 and Z from Morgan Stanley's West Coast Technology Investment

Banking Practice, where she focused on technology IPOs. And here she focuses, she's on the

corporate development team and she focuses on the capital network and more particularly the public

side of the capital network. We have Steve McDermid, also on the

corporate development team and also a former investment banker who focuses on the capital network as

well, but more on the private side. And then we have Scott Cooper, who's going to actually start

off with us before he has to leave. And he's a managing partner of Andreessen Horwitz.

Okay. So welcome, guys. Let's just get started. Okay. So, you know, Square went public

obviously yesterday and created all kinds of news and, you know, but just to recap and then we're going to

go in detail, right? I think the thing that kind of got people excited about the deal was you have

an IPO that prices at a price that's below where the last private round, it also happened to have this,

you know, feature that we've all talked about before, which is this concept of a ratchet,

meaning, you know, in basic terms that the kind of investors who came into that last private round

essentially got the price reset as part of this IPO. So when you think about kind of the more

meta question, which is you've got valuations in the private

market, and then you've got obviously kind of, you know, this at least initial day of reckoning

that comes in the form of an IPO and you therefore have your first public price.

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