Bankers, according to Ben Narasin, are like penguins on an ice floe. They waddle over to the water and take a look at the fish—hungry, but wary of the sea lions and seals that want to eat them. Eventually, one slips and falls into the water, coming back with a fish, unscathed. The rest slide down the ice. “That’s what the IPO market is going to be,” Narasin told me. Once the first few succeed, likely early next year, bankers will bring an avalanche of startups to the public markets.
Narasin is the founder and general partner of the seed-stage-focused Tenacity Venture Capital and a former partner at New Enterprise Associates, so his extensive experience with the tech lifecycle gives him a claim to the assessment, even if it isn’t the most flattering of the profession (Narasin said he uses the same one for VCs.) “An unlimited number of penguins, piling into the ocean,” as he put it.
