Stamford firm may go public
Since its 2004 launch, Indeed Inc. has helped people near and far find jobs.
In the process, it has become a significant employer in its own backyard ”“ and could be on the brink of bigger things.
Indeed CEO Paul Forster mulled the possibility of his dot-com pursuing an initial public offering of stock, while participating in a Startup Connecticut panel in Stamford, where it is based.
The new federal JOBS Act may have helped the company push back the necessity of an IPO, Forster said, with the law allowing companies to remain private if they have more than 500 investors.
At deadline, no Connecticut company had gone public this year, according to Greenwich-based Renaissance Capital, with Ridgefield-based Chef”™s Warehouse the last to do so. That was in July. It raised $135 million. Norwalk-based Kayak Software Corp. filed for an IPO in November 2010, but 18 months later had yet to execute it.
Indeed has not disclosed funding since 2005, when it raised $5 million from The New York Times Co. and Union Square Ventures.
“The IPO onramp ”¦ is the most interesting part for us,” Forster said. “That really enables us to track our path to IPO without being (forced) into it.”
Founded in 2004 by Forster and Rony Kahan, who created a finance industry job site called Jobsinthemoney, Indeed has broadened from being a metasearch engine for other job boards to posting resumes itself beginning last year and allowing jobseekers to apply for jobs directly from its website.
In March, a company called SilkRoad published a study showing Indeed provides more new hires than any other recruitment source, ahead of CareerBuilder, Monster, Craigslist, LinkedIn and SimplyHired, as well as campus and recruiter websites.
Indeed is the only Fairfield County company to rank among the 100 most-visited web sites in the United States, according to Alexa Internet Inc., even as it has expanded to more than 50 other countries.
The company employs some 500 people, including 150 in Stamford, according to Forster. In March, the company announced plans to add 50 people in Dublin, Ireland, which will serve as the base of its European expansion.
The question becomes the degree to which Indeed would add jobs in Stamford with any major infusion of capital from an IPO or other source. In addition to the Dublin jobs, the company lists 15 open positions in Stamford; about twice that number in Austin, Texas, where it has a development site; and a few handfuls more in New York City and Mountain View, Calif.
Forster said Stamford has been a great place for the company”™s headquarters, giving it access to talent not just in Fairfield County but in New York City and Westchester County as well.
With the JOBS Act giving companies additional room to grow, the hope is they can go public when they are ready.
“How steep do we want to make that hill to climb to get access to capital?” said Jeff Evans, head of equity capital markets at UBS AG. “We see many companies that are close to or thinking about or recently public companies, that have an awful lot of time spent around the tracking of requirements around (being) a public company. One of the great things about the JOBS Act is that it starts to sort of smooth that transition out and doesn”™t cause a wall to have to be scaled to get to the public markets.”