Ron Conway on When the IPO Market Will Re-Emerge

While OpenTable had a very successful IPO yesterday, the IPO market might not open up for other tech startups for at least another year, says prolific Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway. He made the assessment in a video interview with Vator.tv’s Bambi Francisco on mobile startups, republished below.

Questioned on when he sees the IPO market open up again, Conway responds that he thinks we are at least one year away. He’s more bullish on the M&A market picking up again, expressing the hope that this is only six months away.

In the rest of the interview, Conway mostly talks up some of the 130 startups he’s invested in to date, although interestingly he reveals that he’s not on Facebook or Twitter because he doesn’t have the time for any of these services.

He also claims two of his portfolio companies, Admob and Digg, could one day go public. But that’s at least a year away.

OpenTable IPO Soars 59%

OpenTable’s successful IPO should give startups and VCs a sign of hope that you can still go public if you have a real business.OpenTable was up 59% from its initial offering price of $20. With 21.6 M shares outstanding, this gives OpenTable an initial market cap of ~$689M. See more detailed information here.

If you are not familiar with OpenTable: OpenTable delivers reservation management software to restaurants through a Web browser and collects monthly subscription revenues. In many respects, it is in the same class of software companies as Salesforce—selling software as a service over the Web to business customers. But it also has a friendly (free) consumer-facing side. It is yet another example of enterprise and consumer apps merging in the cloud.

OpenTable is a solid Internet company with a proven track record. It generated ~$55.8 M in revenues last year and a net loss of $1 million (largely due to expansion-related costs). In the first quarter of 2009, it managed to turn a net profit of $366,000 on revenues of $16 million.

So what does it take for a tech company to IPO these days? If OpenTable is the new measuring stick, a company needs at least $50 million in revenues, have at least one quarter of profits, customers with proven loyalty, and solid growth potential. In other words, it needs to be a real business.

Medialet’s Raises $4 Million

Medialets just announced a $4 million Series A funding led by Foundry Group.

Medialets launched about a year ago as an analytics and ad-serving platform for iPhone apps and now works with more than 1,000 developers and advertisers including Paramount FedEx and Dockers. The company plans to provide its ad technology on other smartphones including the forthcoming Palm Pre and BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Symbian devices by year’s end.

According to Eric Litman, the company’s CEO, Medialets is focused on becoming the standard for rich media advertising units around mobile as well as making the whole process of ad buying, managing, planning and forecasting easier for everyone in the ecosystem in mobile.

Medialets’ platform today is used by publishers including MasterCard, MTV Networks and Tribune Media to serve and track interactive ads in iPhone and Android-based apps. Revenue from the ad-supported apps is shared by developers and Medialets.

Litman said that while mobile advertising overall is forecast to increase 30% or more this year, display advertising in mobile apps appears to growing faster than that on the mobile Web. Regarding ad formats, he noted that mobile banners that expand into full-page ads and full-screen interstitials have proven to be among the most popular units.

Medialets plans to use the financing to continue to improve its platform and develop new ad technology tools for agencies and advertisers. To meet those goals, it also plans to expand its staff of 14 with new technology-related hires.

Other venture-backed companies trying to capitalize on the popularity of iPhone and other mobile apps by launching their own ad-serving and analytics tools include Pinch Media, JumpTap and AdMob.

You Know You’re a Hot Company When You Raise Lots of Money (Without a Business Model)

The Web 2.0 microblogging-messaging platform everyone (or at least some of us) loves to obsess about has raised another $35 million.

Twitter has added Benchmark and Institutional Venture Partners to its list of investors, the company announced via a blog post today. Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures, which had previously invested in the company, have re-upped as well.

No details, of course, from Twitter about its current valuation. Last month the company was looking at raising $20 million or so at a valuation of $200 million to $250 million, and I’m told the new value is on the high side of that range.

The last time Twitter raised money, a little more than a year ago, investors pegged its value at just under $100 million. What’s changed since then? Well, it still doesn’t make any money. But it has many more users: The company says active users have increased 900 percent in the last year; comScore (SCOR) says the site’s home page now attracts 2.6 million unique a month, up 1,362 percent over the last year.

Anyone who’s ever read anything about Twitter knows that the company still has no revenue and/or business model–I just mentioned it one paragraph ago! So no need to go into that here. But for the record, note that co-founder Biz Stone, at the end of his funding announcement, says the company will indeed use some of its new money to go make…money: “We are now positioned extremely well to support the accelerating growth of our service, further enable the robust ecosystem sprouting up around Twitter, and yes, to begin building revenue-generating products.”

And for a nice summary of the company’s promise and peril, check out this week’s New York magazine. Money quote, literally, from CEO Evan Williams: “We have a product, and we’re working on it,” Williams said, with more than a hint of exasperation. “The money will come.”