Creditcards.com started the trend, and now Austin-based Convio has filed papers with the SEC for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) of their stock. The offering is led by Goldman Sachs, one of the premier investment bankers in the world.
Convio was founded in 1999 initially with the name ShowSupport.com.
Earlier in the year, Convio acquired GetActive Software of Berkeley,
California which had revenues of $12.8M in 2006.
The filing discloses revenues dating back to 2004, which were $8.9M. Revenues grew to $13.2M in 2005 and $21.4M in 2006. In the first half of 2007 the company reported revenues of $15.4M ($5.7M of that is from GetActive), which would put them at an annual rate of about $30M. The company has never been profitable. Old school rule of thumb used to say that you needed 3 quarters of positive earnings to consider an IPO, and then the dot com bust changed those rules.
It appears that CEO Gene Austin is making a healthy living, with compensation at $384K last year. There is a lot of interesting data in this filing. Perhaps we will do some more analysis and share that with you.
What do you think?
There was some recent news that they owe tons of money and have major security issues with the software.
Some websites reported that 90+ client sites were hacked into and user names, passwords, email addresses (ect…) were stolen.
As far as revenue growing, I thought this company was still losing money in the tune of around $5,000,000 a year with only 300 employee’s or so. What’s the scoop there?
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