With Facebook going public, the private secondary markets move on.
With the secondary private markets about to lose their cash cow, I was curious as to what companies might be able to (partially) fill the void. So I rang up SecondMarket, which last Friday laid off around 10% of its 150-person workforce in preparation of the Facebook IPO. The exchange wouldn’t divulge trading data on private companies, but did provide a list of the most “watched” companies by their users.
Facebook obviously was up top, followed by Twitter, Dropbox, Foursquare and Square. No real surprises there, but I hadn’t previously considered Craigslist, which sits at #8. The only non-IT company on the list was Bloom Energy (#12). Here’s the full Top 20:
- 1. Facebook
- 2. Twitter
- 3. Dropbox
- 4. Foursquare
- 5. Square.
- 6. hulu
- 7. Gilt Groupe
- 8. Craigslist
- 9. LivingSocial
- 10. Spotify
- 11. KAYAK
- 12. Bloom Energy
- 13. Quora
- 14. Etsy
- 15. Evernote
- 16. Pinterest
- 17. Airbnb
- 18. Tumblr
- 19. Flipboard
- 20. Box
SecondMarket also provided a list of the 10 companies that experienced the most watchlist growth in March:
- 1. Pinterest: 45%
- 2. TaskRabbit: 44%
- 3. Warby Parker: 29%
- 4. Fitbit: 29%
- 5. WhatsApp: 27%
- 6. Millennial Media: 25%
- 7. Practice Fusion: 24%
- 8. ServiceNow: 24%
- 9. ZocDoc: 22%
- 10. Jawbone: 20%
Just to reiterate, these are lists of companies that SecondMarket users are watching, not lists of trading volume. In fact, some of these companies may not actually have shares trading on secondary markets. Still, it’s an interesting view into where investors are looking to buy next…
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