BlackSky Stock: Low-Latency Geospatial Intelligence

If you can figure out what motivates someone, you’re in a much better position at the negotiation table. In the case of special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), you have three stakeholders at the table – the sponsor who gets paid millions if any deal gets done (sponsors have seen average returns of +958%), the company going public which will receive 100s of millions of capital with little effort, and the retail investor who becomes everyone’s bitch. The motivation for the sponsor and startup is always to get the deal done. For them, little matters after that.

“SPAC Rout Erases $75 Billion in Startup Value,” was the title of a WSJ article yesterday which was published a year and a month after we wrote about How SPACs Reward Everyone Except Retail Investors. In the WSJ article, a few sorrowful characters are introduced, investors who thought SPACs were the road to getting rich quick. They’re not, and it’s likely to get a whole lot worse.

The reason we continue to write about SPACs is because some are decent companies,