Cafepress went public this morning after 13 years in the making. This is in stark contrast to the 6.5 years it took the average venture backed company to reach IPO in 2011 (DJ VentureSource). Fortunately for cafepress’ early investors, the company only required $18Mil in venture financing over the past 13 years, which is a fraction of the $85Mil that the average venture backed company needed to reach an IPO in 2011 (DJ VentureSource).
Cafepress is an e-commerce platform for custom printing and production. In it’s simplest form it allows you to print custom t-shirts for your student club or custom coffee mugs for your small business. Cafepress’ “secret sauce” allows it to ship custom orders within 72 hours of placement, and sometimes within the same-day. The company’s streamlined operations also allows it to complete orders of any size with minimal setup costs. Cafepress’ 15Mil members have created over 320Mil unique designs to date.
Cafepress also owns and operates CanvasOnDemand.com, Imagekind.com, GreatBigCanvas.com and InvitationBox.com.
Here’s a look at cafepress by the numbers.
Cafepress’ venture investors consisted of Institutional Venture Partners, New Millenium Partners, PacRim Venture Partners, Staenberg Venture Partners, and Sequoia Capital. Most notably, Sequoia did not sell any of its stake during the IPO and now owns ~17% of the company post-IPO.
Congrats to the team at cafepress on their recent IPO.
