RALEIGH – The post-IPO celebration at Bandwidth didn’t last long. The communications provider went public on Nasdaq a month ago and reported its first quarterly financials as a public company on Wednesday. And the grilling from a high-profile group of Wall Street analysts began.

CEO and co-founder David Morken as well as Chief Financial Officer Jeff Hoffman dueled – in a pretty friendly fashion – with:

  • Meta Marshall – Morgan Stanley
  • Clarke Jeffries – KeyBanc
  • Richard Davis – Canaccord
  • Pat Walravens – JMP Securities
  • Will Power – Baird

Bandwidth beat expectations for revenues and earnings, thus setting a positive stage for the call. But in a live discussion where a wrong word or term or flippant remark could impact the stock price and analysts’ perspectives, the Bandwidth execs tread carefully.

Marshall led off the Q&A session with a complex, multi-part question addressing a variety of topics. Here’s how the discussion went, according to a transcript provided by financial news website SeekingAlpha:

Marshall:

Congratulations on the quarter. I wanted to get a sense of now being public and trying to ramp your OpEx line items, what you’re seeing as far as hiring? Are you able to onboard those people as quickly as possible? Is there any kind of slowdown ahead for the holiday season? And then just in kind of early reads since the IPO and targeting kind of customers you’d like to go after, are you seeing any difference in sales cycles or conversations before and after being public?

David Morken

Morken

Thank you, Meta. … In regard to hiring, this morning, I spent the bulk of my time interviewing and our team is hitting all cylinders, as you can imagine, deploying our proceeds as we outlined toward our growth going forward and that involves a focus in marketing and sales and other areas. We aren’t providing specific guidance or numbers around key teams, but to answer your question, we’re seeing our people services group execute the way that we’ve been proud of for quite a while and we anticipate that we’ll continue to work hard to get the right folks in the right seats to execute our plan in ’18 and beyond.

To the second part of your question and I think there are two parts to the second part of your question. We have identified target prospects that we’re excited about approaching … and while there is a holiday fast approaching, historically, we haven’t seen a whole lot of seasonality in our business. And so we’ll continue to sell through the holiday … so it reflects the culture that we have at the company, but we’re an aggressive team and focused on growth.

Does that answer your question?

Marshall:

I guess I just wanted to get a sense of conversations with prospective customers. Have they changed any now that you’ve gone through — now that they have seen a little bit more publicity from you guys or a little bit more marketing, has the conversation changed with prospective customers?

Morken:

Our customers are, as you know, enterprise customers that do pay attention to the capital markets and to your stat as a private versus a public company and we’ve enjoyed inbound interest in our offering from enterprise customers that we don’t think historically may have been able to find us, given our bootstrapped approach to marketing historically. So I would describe the public offering as a tailwind in terms of PR and that’s reflected by activity on the sales desk.

The rest of the call

From there, questions continued with some good give-and-take.

You can read the full transcript online.