Finance History | One Market Plaza — A Million Shares at Eleven Dollars and No Venture Tape

People treat Autodesk as a San Francisco design-software campus and a later Nasdaq-100 weight.

The public company was a Marin County partnership that reached a listing without a venture round.

John Walker's internal file dates the sale to 28 June 1985. David Weisberg's history of the firm records one million shares priced at 11 dollars each and a little more than 10 million dollars raised after underwriting fees.

Weisberg also records fiscal 1985 AutoCAD shipments near 25,000 units, gross revenue of 27 million dollars, and profit of more than 6 million dollars in that year's currency. Those figures are why the book could price without outside equity.

Walker later wrote that the original stockholders saw a return of 165 dollars for each dollar they had put in. That is his internal multiple, not the offer price on the tape.

By year-end 1985 the stock was selling for 21 dollars a share. The company had been incorporated in California in 1982 around AutoCAD running on an IBM PC.

The mechanism is a product company funding itself from software invoices until the float can be sold to the public. There is no preferred stack and no liquidation preference to unwind on listing day.

Headquarters later left Sausalito and San Rafael. Autodesk now occupies One Market Plaza at 1 Market Street, San Francisco. The pin is the Market Street entrance of that complex, visible from the Embarcadero sidewalk.

Photo: Eric in SF, 22 April 2001, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. One Market Plaza from the waterfront.