Hi everyone. Welcome to the A6NZ podcast. I'm Sonal. Today we're doing one of our War Stories

podcast where we have founders, makers, and operators share the story behind the story. And joining

us for this episode, we have A6NC General Partner Jeff Jordan, who was president of PayPal at

eBay before going to online restaurant reservation network OpenTable, where as a CEO, he oversaw

the company going public.

We're going to talk about all that in this episode, focusing on everything from the

relationship building involved on the road to IPO and the nuances of pricing and allocations

to the broader market context and some concrete advice for entrepreneurs.

And last but not least, we have special guest, J.D. Moriarty joining this conversation.

He's now SVP of Corp Dev at LendingTree, but was formerly managing director and head of equity

capital markets at Bank of America, Merrill Lynch. J.D. was the lead banker, the capital

markets expert from Merrill Lynch on the open table IPO. He and Harry Wagner of Allen and Company were the two

keys who basically helped execute a deal in about the worst capital market situation.

When was that? Late 2008, early 2009. A venture-backed technology firm had not gone public

in a couple of years. The concern was that the window was closed, bricked over, and the

only exit path for tech companies was going to be M&A from then on. We ended up pricing at the

nadir of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. I used to talk about 200 IPOs a

year. And the only IPO prior to Open Table in 2009 was a company called Mead Johnson, so a very defensive

company, the type of thing that should go out in 2009 in consumer products.

They make like the floor wax or something, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Very far from this weird thing called OpenTable, which is not even a product you can physically

...