Apple’s IPO, before the NASDAQ was a “real” market

Apple went public in December 1980. They successfully raised $100 million at $22 per share. They’ve split those shares 2:1 three times since then, and 7:1 once, and 4:1 once, plus they’ve bought back a lot of shares, but roughly that $22 share today is worth at least $40,000.

If you read this blog, you know that rise in value isn’t what mosts interests me, but rather the fact that Morgan Stanley’s 1981 analyst report said that Apple was an over-the-counter stock rather than saying it was listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange. The NASDAQ was ten years old in 1981.

If you read the most recent post, you learned that Berkshire Hathaway didn’t list on the New York Stock Exchange until 1988. I’ve seen sources that say it too was listed on the NASDAQ years before then, but that doesn’t seem to merit mention even in 1988.

The NASDAQ today (2023) is the second largest stock market in the world, alone larger than most stock markets in most countries. So when exactly did it rise from being considered a fancy electronic way to trade over-the-counter to being a “real” stock market? Best I can find, June 1982.

Above is the oldest article I can find in the New Your Times TimesMachine that talks about the “move away from the O-T-C to a separate universe”, with Apple Computer as the first example company mentioned.

So again, just as we all tend to think that venture capital has been around forever, it feels like the NASDAQ has been around just as long, when in fact the NASDAQ as only been truly important for forty years (which for me was 8th grade).

UPDATE

The Wall Street Journal on December 12, 1980 published a much longer story about Apple’s IPO. The lede was that the State of Massachusetts deemed it too risky.

What I found more interesting was in the second column, where it says the offering is registered in 27 states.

One more offhand remark showing how the NASDAQ wasn’t by 1980 a national stock exchange where the federal laws would override the individual state laws. Not even at the scale of a $100 million public fundraising.

I grew up in the early years of personal computers and was a young adult in the early years of the web/internet, with most of my career in the age of mobile phones and wireless connectivity. I’ve never had to run a company without having a computer-based spreadsheet for computations. I remember adding machines with paper tapes, but never owned one. And until this week had never seen and NCR...

While reading about nostalgic computing on the Chip Letter, I came across the following picture of hand-written assembly code for the IBM S/360. What caught my eye wasn’t the paper spreadsheet, but the ah ha moment of clarity explaining why assemblers assume anything in the first column of text is a label, i.e. why assemblers require mnemonics to be prefixed by a space or tab. I’m an...

The buzzword of 2024 is “AI” and like social, mobile, cloud, fintech, and blockchain, every startup is claiming to have it and every big startup fundraising is claiming to expand what can be done with it. Or in short, we’ve been here before. A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle does a very good job explaining how this will play out in 13 steps, and how it already played...

The standard structure for private equity funds (and venture capital funds) is “2&20”, as in a 2% management fee (±1%) and 20% (±10%) of the profits, a.k.a. “carried interest“. Why 20% of the profits? Henry Kravis of KKR explains below, starting at 6:00. TL;DR: Necessity, as he and his partners had no capital to put at risk. Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens...

I came across the word “transmogrify” today and wondered if the author first learned it reading Calvin & Hobbes, as I don’t recall ever seeing the word before that. Luckily for us denizens of the 21st Century, we can ask Google’s Ngrams the popularity of a word back a few centuries: Turns out no, the word isn’t new to Calvin & Hobbes. It was used to describe...