It looks like Convio’s CEO, Gene Austin, had a talk with Fortune Magazine’s Jon Fortt. The most telling quote is here:
It’s not like Convio it trying to be the next Google (GOOG). The company has 335 employees, most of them in Austin, with satellite offices in Berkeley and Washington, D.C. Revenues for 2007 were a respectable $43.1 million, though there are no profits yet. In its most recent quarterly earnings report, the company posted revenue of $14.7 million, $1.3 million in operating cash flow, and a GAAP net loss of a little under $1 million. So the company seems to be on basically stable footing, though it certainly doesn’t have a lot of room for error.
Look to see that paragraph referenced a lot if Convio is pitching its products to you… As for the prospects of Convio returning to raise more capital via an IPO…
Austin says Convio will give an IPO another go when financial markets are more stable (”not up 200, down 200?), the U.S. economy has settled down, and software-as-a-service companies are getting healthy valuations. Of course, that might not take too long – but it will almost certainly be more than a year.
Personally, I would love for more nonprofit CRM vendors to go public. It makes it easier for me to cover them because of the added transparency.
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[...] Non-Profit Tech Blog… More on Convio Not Going Public… Allen Benamer points us to a Fortune Magazine article offering more explanation of Convio’s [...]
Convio took control of the market in acquiring GetActive, but they didn’t add to the market. The IPO was ill-timed and they cannot compete effectively on the high end against Blackbaud NetCommunity, which is where they wanted to go. Convio is already a has been, and their software wasn’t that good anyway.