MariaDB plunges nearly 40% in NYSE debut after SPAC merger (opens in new tab)

Does anyone have info on what price early investors got the shares?

Retail launches are always designed to let them cash out with big multiples no matter what the price does.

I remember buying something I thought was “early” for $5 a share and later we learned the real earlies got in for $0.25. I was able to sell somehow at a price of $12 in the mania after it launched, but of course it eventually bled out down to $0.25 and beyond because of the constant selling from the insiders. They were always in profit, what did they care?

I had no idea Mariadb was a startup. I thought it was an open source fork if mysql

My recollection is that it was created when Oracle took over MySQL in order to continue to have a community-driven GPLv2 "mysql compatible" server; I was expecting them to be more different than they are, but for comparison one is a "clean" GPLv2" and the other has more words and a link to oracle.com: https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server/blob/mysql-8.0.31/LICE... https://github.com/MariaDB/server/blob/mariadb-10.11.1/COPYI...

Absolutely not. It's main feature is being wire compatible with mysql.

It’s just a fork of mysql.

> who can probably do both

he can probably do neither

definitely the other way around, SPACs require up-front capital and a lot more connections!

That got its roots from the IPO. I hope you are not putting IPOs on some type of infallible pedestal.

Don’t the shareholders get their money back with interest if they don’t like the deal? I thought the way a SPAC works was roughly:

- sponsors create a spac selling shares+warrants for, say, $10

- they have two years to merge with a company

- when the merger is sorted, shareholders can choose either (a) to get their money back + 3%, (b) to get their share in the resulting company and discard their warrant, or (c) to get their share and exercise their warrant to buy another share at some potentially good price

- the sponsors get 20% of the pre-warrant equity in the spac’s investment. I think they might have a long lock-out period before they can sell too

- if no merger happens, investors get back their money with interest.

So maybe I don’t understand what you mean, or maybe I don’t understand what a spac is, but isn’t it bad for the sponsors if the shareholders don’t like the merger? Maybe it’s more subtle and it is a lot worse than coming up with a good merger but still better than not doing the spac at all.

I think the bigger problem is most of the companies that go public this way are dogshit money-losers that shouldn't be public in the first place.

I don't think you should consider this a problem. They are providing a service for OTHER people who want to invest. Effectively, they are selling picks and shovels to people who want to mine gold. Barring SEC regs, it's not up to the "people who put them together" to judge whether or not the investment is a good one. The people who want to invest do, and take their chances.

BlackSky, Getaround, others...

Ah, that's what they were comparing - thanks, I missed that entirely. Given My and Maria are his kids names I'd jumped to that interpretation.

That's what eponym means, hence what the grandparent said.

Don't forget that things are the way they are for good reasons, or at least historically good reasons. At least with next-quarter-itis you're holding execs accountable for delivering _something_ relatively soon. It's an imperfect check-and-balance.

Are you excited by the fact that Mark Z doesn't suffer from this disease with Meta and is spending $25B/yr on a virtual reality platform that won't provide returns for many years, if at all?

Quarterly reporting (and the inevitable over-weighting of it) is there to PROTECT small-time investors.

We need a new exchange that focuses on driving profits for shareholders over a longer term especially ones with wider goals. I think there is a market desire for companies that have positive social or public goals but still make sense organized as a for-profit. What we might get is less pan-flash/hyper-growth-startup-IPO and more organically grown companies with a certain amount of staying power and positive social or public goals.

Our current model of “must have quarter over quarter growth” is a good a check in theory but it’s too easy to cut corners in the short term instead of solving systemic, organizational problems which just kicks the can down the road.

We need a law that says that CEOs and C-suite writ large and board members can't receive stock/options/RSU. Otherwise, we'll always be stuck in Goodhart's law. Maybe they make enough already and don't need bonuses. The "bonus" is keeping your job not getting a golden parachute.

My impression is that the incentives leading to "next-quarter-itis" are primarily executive compensation and investor's own timelines (influenced by long term cap gains only requiring one year).

Keeping companies private just limits who can own them and doesn't help.

That's a bit '-ish'.

The bar is too high and there are huge numbers of really decent companies that need some kind of liquidity.

We're just not set up for it. Maybe it's a matter of just bringing more attention to small caps, I don't know.

Or another vehicle.

There are just too many truly great value creating business out there whereupon it's very difficult for founders to get their accumulated value out of it. People have devoted their lives to doing some good thing, but it's pointless if it's hard to market the company. This absolutely has effects on the industry because it's literally not worth the devotion required to do so many things if there can be no upuside even a good scenario of making a decent company.

It leaves way too much money in the hands of bankers and speculators and not those to took the biggest risks, made it work and likely created surpluses for everyone.

Definitely we need a new model.

The reason they're rare is that the people involved prefer the ripoff (or the scam, if the ripoff won't work).

Direct listing is most logical and if done right, the company will get the most of actual benefit.

Especially since companies can, as of recently, issue new shares to sell as part of the listing (like they would in an IPO) instead of relying on insiders to provide the liquidity.

I read somewhere that they end up costing as much as an IPO for some arcane reasons. Maybe that's not actually the case?

From the link:

> During a 2020–2021 boom period for SPACs, they attracted prominent names such as Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, and Deutsche Bank, in addition to retired or semiretired senior executives.

Now, why retired or semi-retired senior exec who are most probably already swimming in money and have a certain age are even thinking about these investments instead of just spend the fortune they have and enjoy life? I guess I'll never be such an exec...

It's part of the terms of a SPAC that they have to find a deal within (usually) a year or return the money. There are hardly any new SPACs being started up, but the ones left over from the boom still have to make the best of what they've got.

> It's actively used by many companies in production

The problem is not many of them want to pay for it. $40 million in ARR after 13 years and $227 million in funding isn't great.

We use it in production. It’s a corpse, all right. The only reason we haven’t gone Postgres is because our codebase is extremely extensive and dependent on MySQL/Maria.

I often hear whimpering when I fly too close to Lanai.

Sorry, my bad. I forgot to the "just". You don't have to just be smart and hardworking.