Joanna Glasner

There are all kinds of puns one could make up about a company developing treatments for irritable bowel syndrome that just pulled off a somewhat disappointing initial public offering. For negative spin, one could talk about how no one seems able to unclog the life sciences IPO market. Or, for a more positive take, how a bowel company’s market debut, though priced below expectations, offers some signs of relief for the blocked-up pipeline of initial public offerings.

As an entrepreneur, Gary Kremen knows something about growth industries. In the early 1990s, he had enough foresight about the porn industry's online potential to register the domain Sex.com. Later, he moved into online dating, founding dating site Match.com. These days, however, the San Francisco-based serial founder is all about solar. Clean Power Finance, which Kremen founded in 2006 several months after selling Sex.com for a reported $14 million, last week closed a $6.9 million Series A funding round. The round was co-led by venture firms Claremont Creek Ventures and Clean Pacific Ventures. Sand Hill Angels, an angel investment group in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Kremen also participated.

An IPO market return won’t kill off private share trading sites. But it could cause a broader shift from buy-and-hold investments to more arbitrage-type transactions, with investors looking to profit from spreads between public and private valuations. So says Greg Brogger, CEO of SharesPost, the five-month-old site for buying and selling private company stock. The company just launched a new set of analyst reports on some closely watched venture-backed companies. When I spoke to Brogger, about the announcement, he told me that the site is also seeing a big increase in the size of transactions. “When we started, the average transaction size was $5k to $50k,” Brogger explains. But over the last few transactions, he adds, the size has increased substantially, to $200k to $250k.