Taking a Startup to the Opening Bell

by Mark Gritter and Neal Tovsen | at MinneBar 13

What is it like to take a company public? What happens in an initial public offering, and what does it take to get there?

In June 2017, the company I co-founded went public, after nine years as a startup. I'll talk about why we did an IPO, the mechanics of becoming a public company, and the personal experience of seeing my company reach this milestone. Bring your own questions for this informal presentation, moderated by Neal Tovsen.

All levels

Mark Gritter

Mark Gritter is a Founding Engineer at Akita Software, his fourth startup experience, building API observability. Mark formerly worked at HashiCorp on the Vault team; co-founded Tintri, an enterprise storage company that IPOed in 2017; and was a day-one employee at Kealia, a video streaming startup acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2004.

Mark's previous Minnebar presentations have covered topics such as correctness of algorithms, combinatorial auctions, scaling a startup, building a file system, and procedural content generation.

Neal Tovsen

Freelance tech nerd specializing in product development and software engineering. Cofounder of two tech startups, and years of helping other seed-stage companies build teams, build software, and launch (or reinvent) products. Recent experience spans fintech, IoT, healthcare IT, marketing platforms, and consumer marketplaces.