Finance History | 5453 Great America Parkway — Forty-Three Dollars Above a Thirty-Six Dollar Range

People treat Arista as a Santa Clara campus that sells switches into other companies' clouds.

The first public print was a New York listing priced through the top of the range.

Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton and Ken Duda started the company in 2004.

Ten years later, on 6 June 2014, Arista Networks priced 5,250,000 common shares at 43 dollars each, above a marketed range of 36 to 40 dollars.

The company announced that the shares would begin trading that day on the New York Stock Exchange under ANET.

Contemporary accounts put the proceeds at about 226 million dollars in 2014 currency. Underwriters received a 30-day option on 787,500 more shares.

Net proceeds were slated for general purposes and working capital.

The product on offer was a software-defined Ethernet switch running Arista's Extensible Operating System, sold against Cisco's installed base in large data centers.

The mechanism is a profitable hardware-and-software vendor using an oversubscribed IPO to fund a share fight in cloud switching without inventing a new product on the offering date.

The pin is 5453 Great America Parkway in Santa Clara, the operating campus when the tape opened.

Photo: Arild Vågen, August 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. New York Stock Exchange from Broad Street, where ANET listed.