A long journey to historic IPO for tech firm BBTV's female chief
Shahrzad Rafati was only 17 when she landed in Vancouver with a single suitcase of belongings. She knew little English, had no computer skills and had lived through both revolution and war in her birth country of Iran. Twenty-three years later, Rafati has taken a tech company public in the largest IPO in the Toronto Stock Exchange's history for a firm run by a female founder and chief executive.
Vancouver-based BBTV Holdings Inc. debuted on the TSX on Wednesday at $16 per share after successfully raising $172.4 million. The bulk of the cash — $158.8 million — was used to buy back the 51-per-cent stake it sold to European media conglomerate RTL Group in 2013 for $36 million.
BBTV's IPO ranks among the top-10 for tech companies on the TSX. “I hope we're making history,” Rafati said in an interview. “I hope women and girls can see themselves in this moment and realize that no achievement is out of reach no matter what corner of the world you're from.”
BBTV is a tech and media company that helps clients such as the NBA, Sony Corp. and AT&T Inc.'s Warner Brothers create, distribute and predominately monetize their digital video content across platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Snapchat. The company doesn't just work with the original content that its partners own, either. It tracks down fan-uploaded content — think of when YouTube users upload NBA highlights — and works to monetize them as well.
Rafati came up with the idea only a few months into founding BBTV. The company was launched in 2005, the same year as YouTube, and started in hardware. Rafati wanted to take advantage of the rise of digital video and helped create a product that would allow users to watch videos from the internet on their TVs.
When the company didn't hit the ground running, Rafati changed its focus. She noticed that fans were uploading videos that they didn't hold the rights to on YouTube and that the actual owners were swiftly taking them down. What they likely saw as an inconvenience, she saw as opportunity.
“A good entrepreneur is one that really pays attention to trends and you need to pivot as needed,” Rafati said. “When we first started the business, there was also a lot of activity around fan-uploaded content so we wanted to put the right holders back in control of the IP, help them understand insights associated with that content and bring them revenue streams.”