A shareholder complaint carries Genentech's often-cited 1980 numbers

The record

Genentech, Inc. was founded in 1976; its current corporate site, as retrieved on 16 September 2026, still describes the company as delivering on the promise of biotechnology since 1976, now as a member of the Roche Group. Genentech went public in 1980, a widely cited early biotechnology stock offering. The specific figures usually attached to that offering, a 35 million dollar raise, a 35 dollar per share price, and a jump to an 88 dollar high within under an hour, are not stated on Genentech's current site, which no longer carries a dedicated IPO history page. Those figures do appear in a document this entry could open: a shareholder complaint filed 24 July 2008 in California Superior Court, San Mateo County, captioned Papazian Distributing Co., Inc. v. Roche Holdings, Inc., Case No. CIV 474971, later reproduced as an exhibit in Roche's SEC tender-offer filing for the Genentech shares it did not already own, filed 9 February 2009.

What the documents establish

A complaint is a plaintiff's pleading, not a court's finding or a company's own disclosure, and that distinction matters here. The complaint establishes that a Genentech shareholder's lawyers, describing the company's background for a 2008 fiduciary-duty lawsuit against Roche, characterized the 1980 offering as having leapt from 35 dollars per share to a high of 88 dollars after less than an hour and called it one of the largest stock run-ups ever. Nothing this entry could open shows a court adopting that characterization as fact, and nothing in Genentech's own materials restates the figures. The complaint gives no specific day in 1980, only the year. A number repeated widely in secondary retellings is not thereby verified against a primary filing; here, the earliest document in the trail is itself a litigant's allegation, filed with the SEC only because it was attached as an exhibit to an unrelated 2009 tender-offer filing.

The operating read

This is an editorial reading beyond the documents. A founder citing a well-known IPO's numbers, whether Genentech's or another company's, should ask what kind of document those numbers trace to: a prospectus, an exchange's own trading record, a contemporaneous regulatory filing, or, as here, a pleading filed decades later in unrelated litigation. Genentech's 1980 offering document predates the SEC's electronic filing system and was not available to this entry; that gap, not the number's popularity, is why this entry treats the 35-to-88 dollar figure as a litigant's characterization rather than a verified trading record.

What to check before you decide

Before citing a decades-old IPO statistic in a pitch or memo, check its actual documentary source.

• Does the figure trace to the company's own offering document or a contemporaneous exchange record, or only to a later secondary account?
• If the only available source is litigation, is it a court's finding, or, as here, an unproven pleading's characterization?
• Is a specific date being attached to the event that the underlying document does not state?

This is an editorial checklist. Where this site could not open a primary offering document, it has said so rather than repeating an unverified figure as settled fact.