[Updated throughout 11/15/13, 1:42 p.m. PT]
Seattle is home to another multi-billion-dollar tech company with the initial public offering of Zulily, which sold 11.5 million shares for $22 each Thursday and watched its stock climb as much as 87.8 percent in trading on the NASDAQ Friday.
Zulily shares, trading under the ticker symbol ZU, closed the day at $37.70, up 71.4 percent from the IPO price, giving the four-year-old daily deals site for moms and kids a market capitalization of around $4.5 billion.
The IPO raised $253 million for Zulily, (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ZU]]) and selling stockholders. Zulily adds about $140.3 million to the corporate treasury as a result of the IPO, with the remainder going to inside sellers, including Maveron, the venture capital firm co-founded by Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and Dan Levitan.
The company walked up its offering price from a range of $16 to $18 a share at the beginning of the month to $18 to $20 earlier this week. As was the case with another Seattle tech IPO this year—Tableau Software (NYSE: [[ticker:DATA]])—first-day trading prices far surpassed the offering price, enriching the customers of Wall Street bankers who could turn a very quick profit. (Tableau priced its May IPO at $31 per share, hasn’t traded below $44, and closed Friday at $65.29.)
Fortune’s Dan Primack noted Thursday evening that the IPO pricing was being largely ignored by the tech press outside of Seattle, and offered some theories as to why.
One of those: “Not too many tech reporters have kids,” so they aren’t likely aware of Zulily, his argument goes. Oddly enough, most of the tech reporters I know in Seattle actually do have kids. But having kids might also be a reason to ignore the news, at least temporarily. I’m posting this relatively late after spending a happy afternoon with mine, who definitely sports some gear from Zulily…
Primack notes another interesting angle on the news: Maveron crushing it lately with back-to-back portfolio company IPOs. As with Zulily, Maveron was the largest pre-IPO shareholder in Potbelly (NASDAQ: [[ticker:PBPB]]), the Chicago-based sandwich chain that went public at $14 last month and closed Friday at $30.07.
