The stock market runs in my blood. I have owned stock for most of my life, and I grew up watching Wall $treet Week with my grandfather on summer visits to New York. My favorite game growing up was Fortune 500, a game where players take charge of a company and try to triple their starting capital investment.
Last Friday’s IPO was the end of a natural progression for me that started with stock ownership as a kindergartner. I owned four shares of the Fortune 500-sized company my father worked for, Household International. (I write “Fortune 500-sized” because in those days, Fortune required that the F500 were industrial companies that manufactured products; that rule has since been dropped.) When I learned about a stockholder’s meeting at the company, I asked to go. My parents wrote a note to the kindergarten teacher stating something along the lines of “Please excuse Matthew from class today. He is attending a stockholder’s meeting.”
Finance business culture is more formal, so I wore a suit to the meeting. This picture is undated, and I think a little bit older than the stockholder’s meeting, but not by much. Interestingly, now that I work in technology, I no longer have a three-piece suit.
In the early- to mid-1980s on a summer visit to my grandparents in Westchester County, I was offered the chance to attend a taping of Wall Street Week in Review, a program dedicated to the happenings on the financial markets in the prior week. On the drive into Manhattan, my host kept her handbag firmly between the front seats in case somebody tried to steal it. Every time the sclerotic traffic stopped, the infamous squeegee men provided the much-unneeded service of cleaning the windshield. New York City was viewed as a lawless, polluted place at the time. (As another indicator of how times have changed, my eldest cousin wanted to go to Cooper Union but it was considered far too dangerous to be young in lawless New York. My youngest cousin now attends Columbia and lives in a much safer Manhattan.)
After “drinks” at the Helmsley Hotel – mine was probably ginger ale – I went to the studio. In the course of writing this post, I found out that apparently the host considered putting me on the program, but couldn’t figure out how to make it work.
Fast forward to the present day. The financial markets are significantly more open to widespread participation, and that cultural change has no doubt been driven in part by the broad-based equity culture that comes from Silicon Valley. After eight years of work at Aerohive, four of which I was able to participate in, I joined Team Aerohive on Wall Street for the second most important day in the history of the company.
Let me start off by saying that the New York Stock Exchange gets marketing. It is a storied brand, and the building is basically the high temple of American finance. Among many other promotional activities, the NYSE helped us arrange food trucks throughout the day, including this one that started off outside our hotel.
After a quick walk down Wall Street, we passed through security, had breakfast, and went down to the trading floor to watch our stock open. When I was younger, the NYSE floor at day’s end would be cluttered with scraps of paper used by the traders. Much of that paper has been automated, but the human element of judgment remains. Traders are equipped with Wi-Fi tablets, and the pieces of paper used previously are now zapped over a wireless LAN. (The first NYSE WLAN network was built in part by an early Aerohive employee, though he worked for another company at the time.)
On the floor, we took up position at our market maker’s station. The NYSE has several firms that act as “designated market makers” to provide liquidity and an orderly stock market. The best way I heard it put is that market makers are like pilots: they are most useful in opening (takeoff), closing (landing), and in times of volatility (turbulence). In a neat conversation I had with our CFO, I learned how a company might pick a market maker, which is a great “inside baseball” story that takes you inside the market.
On an IPO day, the stock doesn’t start trading at the opening bell. The NYSE uses a price discovery process to match up buyers with the underwriters to assure an orderly start to trading. I brought my widest-angle lens to get crowd shots while standing at the market maker’s station. In these pictures you’ll see some of the earliest employees of Aerohive.
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In a theme that would recur throughout the day, the Aerohive bee made many appearances.
When the stock began to trade, everybody pulled out phones to grab pictures of the event. I was glad I had brought my SLR.
With trading established and orders flowing, we left the floor, and walked two blocks to the Charging Bull in its “temporary” location. I’ve been to the bull several times, of course, but it had special resonance when I worked for company whose stock was now a registered stock trading on an exchange.
The group went to lunch nearby, and swapped stories of the early days at Aerohive. Adam Conway talked about the early days in Changming Liu’s garage and his relationship with Changming’s dog. Yong Kang told us about his first week at the company. Changming was on vacation, so one of Yong’s most important first-week tasks was to take out the garbage.
After lunch, we went back for the closing bell. Aerohive had won the honor of ringing the closing bell, and the exchange had put up a banner just for us. We took several photos out in front of the exchange, and in perhaps the best moment of the day, we drew a crowd of tourists. For a few brief moments, Aerohive was a tourist attraction in Lower Manhattan.
Back inside for the closing bell, we entered an ornate room, with a massive table. One of the many NYSE executives involved in taking our company public spoke to us, and talked about how his hobby of beekeeping seemed to fit with our theme.
For the closing bell, our executives took to the podium, while the rest of the group gathered right below it. We were all equipped with our own bells and foam bees, and when the closing bell rang, we let loose a volley at the executive team (quite a few of whom volleyed back quite energetically).
As we left the floor, several people asked us for foam bees, including this trader. After being given one, he asked for another one because he had two children. The following picture was my price for giving him a second!
As the closing bell died away, the Aerohive team left the floor to begin life with a newly broadened set of owners, and I left New York having crossed off an item on my bucket list that I didn’t even know was on my bucket list.