Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York
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Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York
#2Wow , exciting!
I must admit , I worry going public might actually be a bad thing for the Pi org. Exposure to the winds of quarterly earnings reports and hardware timelines can often conflict...
I have no real evidence to support that feeling, but I have it just the same.
Excited to see where this leads!
Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York
#3Wasn't it supposed to be a charity/non profit foundation?
Isn't an IPO kinda the opposite of that?
Or is is the fashionable thing these days to claim to be non-profit when you're young and looking for grassroots support, only to transform when there is money to be made?
Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York
#4On the one hand I'm happy they're doing well. On the other I'm very much worried that floating the stock will make it plaything of people who couldn't care less about what the Raspberry Pi and the people behind it stand for, they're just going to use the stock to make money, or, alternatively, to make trouble.
Being a listed company is a source of all kinds of distractions.
Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York
#5Wasn't it supposed to be a charity/non profit foundation? Isn't an IPO kinda the opposite of that? Or is is the fashionable thing these days to claim to be non-profit when you're young and looking for grassroots support, only to transform when there is money to be made?
Yeah... I have major concerns about how significantly this would impact their ostensible goals.
What guarantee is there that the newly publicly listed company won't be pressured by stockholders to improve the profit margins by driving up prices and reducing product quality on both the hardware and software fronts.
Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York
#6I had no idea this was even on the cards. Do they really need to IPO? Why do they need to chance infinite stock market growth?
Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York
#7Wasn't it supposed to be a charity/non profit foundation? Isn't an IPO kinda the opposite of that? Or is is the fashionable thing these days to claim to be non-profit when you're young and looking for grassroots support, only to transform when there is money to be made?
Depends on the structure - Public OpCo controlled by non-profit worked out well for Novo Nordisk. Get the resources needed from the public markets, but still maintain the mission-driven control and focus on diabetes.
Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York
#8Wasn't it supposed to be a charity/non profit foundation? Isn't an IPO kinda the opposite of that? Or is is the fashionable thing these days to claim to be non-profit when you're young and looking for grassroots support, only to transform when there is money to be made?
from memory there are three parts of what we think as Pi
1) the foundation, that does all the outreach, education and magazines
2) The commercial part (the actually makes the pis)
3) R&D
but it might be only two.
Either way I assume only the commercial part will float, leaving the foundation as the majority shareholder. It has the advantage of giving the foundation a couple of hundred million, which should allow it to continue to do great things. (if you think about computer/electronics education, its basically pi and scratch. Arduino has kinda dropped the ball.)
Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York
#9To clarify, this is Raspberry Pi Ltd (formerly Raspberry Pi Trading Ltd), a subsidiary of the Raspberry Pi Foundation (the charity).
I'm curious how this will affect the foundation's mission, but I guess they are already affected by the outside investments from previous fundraising rounds.
Re: Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York
#10Wasn't it supposed to be a charity/non profit foundation? Isn't an IPO kinda the opposite of that? Or is is the fashionable thing these days to claim to be non-profit when you're young and looking for grassroots support, only to transform when there is money to be made?
And now the company will serve the interest of the shareholders above all else. The number gotta go up each quarter.