By Louis Lehot, Partner, Foley & Lardner LLP. Garage to global, since Y2K.
Friends,
Happy Fourth, and happy 250th. The country picked a good week to have a birthday. Stocks just wrapped their best quarter since 2020, a few of our clients had a very good run, and one of them is about to join the Nasdaq-100. Here is the short version before the fireworks. Stay with me to the end this week. I lost a friend and mentor, and I want to tell you about him.
The Tape, Briefly
◊ Best quarter since 2020. Stocks finished the second quarter at the highs, and the Dow closed Thursday at a record near 52,900. A good tape to have at your back heading into a long weekend.
◊ The IPO window is open. Bending Spoons, the Italian software company that owns AOL and Vimeo, went public on the Nasdaq and jumped 42 percent on day one. That is the kind of clean debut that pulls the next names off the sidelines.
◊ A client makes the index. SpaceX joins the Nasdaq-100 on July 7, only weeks after going public, which puts it in millions of retirement accounts overnight.
Recent Deals
◊ LeapXpert, $180 million, led by Riverwood. Our team represented Riverwood Capital in its $180 million growth investment in LeapXpert, announced June 30. LeapXpert is an important company in the cybersecurity and governance infrastructure stack, governing the messaging channels where enterprise business now runs. Congratulations to Riverwood and the LeapXpert team.
◊ OpenLight and Advantest. Our client OpenLight, the silicon photonics company, partnered with Advantest to bring its optical technology into high-volume chip testing for AI data centers. Photonics is how the data center keeps up with AI, and OpenLight sits right at the center of it.
◊ Gatik and PepsiCo. Our client Gatik is running autonomous freight for PepsiCo on real highways, one of the largest commercial driverless deployments to date. Physical AI, actually deployed and not just demoed.
◊ Mirantis and IREN. We helped our client Mirantis in its roughly $625 million sale to IREN, folding its cloud and Kubernetes software into IREN’s fast-growing AI cloud.
Around the Firm
◊ A sneak peek: a big addition is coming. I cannot say the name yet, but we are about to welcome a new partner who works the people side of deals. She is a transactional employment lawyer with more than fifteen years advising companies and investors through M&A, financings, and IPOs: the executive transitions, the compensation, and the culture questions that quietly make or break a transaction. She rounds out a group we have been building all year, and she is exactly who you want in the room when a deal gets complicated. More soon.
◊ Shout-outs to the new GCs. First up, Karna Nisewaner. Congratulations to Karna, named Chief Legal Officer of Silicon Quantum Computing. Karna spent the last few years as General Counsel at Cadence and brings 25 years across semiconductors and AI to one of the boldest hardware bets going, building quantum computers atom by atom. Standing up the legal function at a frontier company is a hard and fun job, and she is the right person for it. Going forward, this is where I will celebrate friends who step into General Counsel and senior in-house roles. If you or someone you know just made the jump, send it my way.
The 250th, Briefly
◊ The country has always been a startup. Two hundred and fifty years ago, 56 people signed their names to a long shot with terrible odds and no plan B. A week of records and fresh listings is a decent way to mark the anniversary. This place runs on people willing to bet on something new, a lot of whom got here from somewhere else, and most weeks I get a front-row seat to the next batch. Worth a quiet cheer today.
From My Desk
◊ How to Make IPOs Great Again. With Bending Spoons up 42 percent on debut and a real pipeline forming behind it, the window is open again. My piece is about keeping it open, and about making sure the next garage company gets to become everybody’s company, not just the giants. It is on my Substack.
On the Calendar
◊ YC Reception. Tuesday, July 8. An evening with the Y Combinator crowd, the founders in the batch and the alumni who remember what the early days felt like. If you run in that orbit, you know how fast these fill.
◊ AI as a Force Multiplier: Scaling Lean Finance Teams Without Adding Headcount. Tuesday, July 22, 5:30 PM. A small evening on how finance leaders are using AI to do more without hiring more, at 525 University Ave in Palo Alto. We keep it intimate on purpose, and the room is the point. RSVP: https://luma.com/kyye2ihx
◊ Investors Summer Drinks. Monday, July 27, 5:30 PM. The venture crowd, a Palo Alto evening, and the people who actually write the checks. The list is short and the invitation is open now. RSVP: https://luma.com/ag41vlaz
◊ TDK Ventures 100X. October 21 to 23, San Francisco. TDK brings its invite-only deep-tech summit to the Commonwealth Club. If you build hard things, this is a room worth getting into.
◊ One Way Summit. October 28 and 29, San Francisco. A thousand immigrant founders and the investors who back them, and I will be on the program.
Closing Argument
◊ If you own the winners, enjoy the record, and remember that nothing goes up in a straight line.
◊ If you are thinking about going public, the window is open and Bending Spoons just proved it trades. Call your bankers before the summer is over.
◊ If you are off today, good. Watch the fireworks, and we will pick it up next week.
One Last Thing
This week we lost Steve Barth, a senior partner in our Milwaukee office and a pillar of Foley, suddenly and far too soon. When my West Coast group joined the firm five and a half years ago, Steve was the one who made us feel like we belonged, the same way he had for generations of partners before us. He built this firm and the people in it, led by outworking every room, and carried a deep, quiet faith that gave him the force of an army in one man. An amazing lawyer, and an even better partner. Our thoughts are with his family. Rest well, Steve.
— Louis Lehot