Business looks good for OC’s cadre of accountancies and management consulting firms, which report strong levels of hiring over the past year—one of many stories you’ll find in this week’s Special Report starting on page 23.
They aren’t getting the extra work from local IPOs; there’s been no traditional public listings from an OC-based firm in nearly nine months, which falls in line with national trends. Domestic IPO activity is down about a third, and capital raised is off by nearly 40% so far this year, recent industry statistics show.
The difficulty of going public—through traditional means, at least—is highlighted in this issue, which notes a scuttled $100 million IPO amid the Great Recession for recently acquired medical device maker TherOx, as well as upstart biotech firm PeproMene Bio’s plans to go public not on Wall Street, but in Korea. See page 1 for more on both.
Also on the front page: a breakout IPO for cybersecurity darling CrowdStrike, formed in Irvine in 2011, headquarters moved to Silicon Valley in 2017, and now a valuation that tops $14 billion.
OC’s tech community will see benefits from the IPO in terms of more jobs, but accountants are likely out of luck: PwC’s San Jose office handles their auditing, SEC filings show.
At $14 billion, CrowdStrike’s valuation is about 9 times what BlackBerry paid for CrowdStrike’s Irvine competitor Cylance, in a deal that closed earlier this year; the local operations are now known as BlackBerry Cylance.
If Cylance founder Stuart McClure regrets not going the IPO route, which was reportedly being considered last year, it wasn’t apparent last week when he served as distinguished executive commencement speaker at the UCI’s Paul Merage School of Business.
He said he’s tried living a life without regrets since 1989, when he survived a horrific mid-flight event on a 747 from Honolulu to Australia, which killed nine people.
“The plane was literally falling out of the sky and into pieces. None of us knew what had gone on. All of us knew simply that we were not going to make it,” McClure said in his address.
There’ve been missteps, he said—“I’ve failed more times than I’ve succeeded, probably on a 100-to-1 ratio”—but “I’ve been given another 30 years of life and have spent almost every year since trying to show the pilot who saved us I was worthy of that gift.”
McClure, whose career includes a stint at E&Y—now styled EY and No. 2 on this week’s accounting list, page 31, and No. 6 on management consultants, page 38—has also had plenty of successes.
Ten years after the plane accident, McClure and CrowdStrike founder George Kurtz started Mission Viejo-based security software company Foundstone. It was sold to McAfee in 2004 for $86 million.
Also in 1999, the duo published a book with Joel Scambray on cybersecurity, “Hacking Exposed.” It’s reported to be one of the best-selling IT security books ever, with more than 600,000 copies printed.
