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Comment by doublesocket | Hacker News Reader

It hasn't gone well for several UK companies listing through SPACs on US exchanges recently. Think that's given plenty of reason for a rethink.

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I can't think of a SPAC, regardless of nationality, that actually succeeded other than Cellebrite. SPACs in their current usage are basically vehicles to circumvent securities fraud and generate wild amounts of money based on hyperbolic slide-decks via PIPE and NAV offerings pre-DA - the amount of EV and Quadcopter plays that were obvious vaporware getting traction in 2020-2022 was insanity.

I've been tracking SPACs as a curiosity. The only ones on my list that are above the $10 starting price are DraftKings, Hims & Hers Health, and Grindr.

In other words: gambling, erection medication, and gay hookups.

Lynk Global are merging with SLAM this year to list publicly which is the only other one I'd watch out for - decent business model, first to debut the satellite to unmodified phone tech in a commercial fashion. GENI will probably recover as well.

Lynk Global will competing against Starlink — which is already manufacturing and operating at scale, and is vertically integrated with their launch provider... which will soon be lofting _much_ larger and more capable satellites on their new launcher. I don't see what worthwhile niche will be left for Lynk to play with.

The cynic in me can't help but wonder if somebody is hoping to cash out via whatever investors haven't yet noticed the writing on the wall.

I think the lesson in the past couple of years of SPACs is that all the companies that sounded obviously important and useful turned out to be massively overvalued and built on sandcastles of hopes and dreams. Lynk does sound like one of those.

And what those few companies that were actually successful — the “gambling, erection medicine, gay hookups” of my previous post — have in common is that they operate businesses that might have some trouble raising money through the gatekeepers of a traditional IPO.

(Logical conclusion: if I ever invest in a SPAC, it’s got to be a drug-dealing furry porn site for crypto traders at minimum.)

They have an actual commercial direct to device service launched, demonstrable, and scalable. I'd also look into the architecture of Starlink versus bent-pipe and other designed-for-purpose system, rather than the retrofit we get from Starlink.

This in contrast with their SPAC competitor AST SpaceMobile, who AT&T just announced their strategic partnership with for Commercial service up to 2030 yesterday and spiked their stock 40% in premarket... to still be about $6.50 off the NAV lol

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/att-ast-space...

So yeah, I think the analysts and Engineers are hedging their bets. Starlink has launch capacity but that's about their edge as the incumbent at the moment. The rest have LEO satellites up and are ramping up constellations as we speak.

Off the top of my head out about DraftKings $DKNG and Vertiv Holdings $VRT. Huge successes there.

True that the majority have been major disappointments but you can find some good ones.

I think of SPACs the same way I think of Regulation Crowdfunding [1]. If the company could have reasonably IPOd, they would have; if they're opting for a reduced process method, it's likely because they wouldn't look good in the traditional process, and it's best to avoid them.

OTOH, it's not like I'm investing in individual stocks anyway, I'm on team Boglehead, and everything is in index funds, other than equity based compensation which I don't have at the moment.

[1] https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-ba...

I'm not sure, but there are other ways of listing besides SPACs, like ADRs

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