Jay Samit Quotes

I always wanted to start a public company and make a lot of money.

Any company of my size cannot live without thinking it's possible to go public one day.

There was a time when I was wondering about this business of going public, so I visited about a half-dozen companies in the Boston area, all of them formed by MIT faculty and all had gone public.

The first thing I ever invested in was Twitter. Blaine Cook, former CTO, was leaving the company and asked me if I wanted to buy his stock.

As a serial entrepreneur, angel investor and public company CEO, nothing irks me more than when a startup founder talks about wanting to cash in with an initial public offering.

I think going public is a really smart thing to do.

The vast majority of companies don't go public and mint dozens of millionaires. And most companies don't go around doling out stock options; private companies tend to be very tight about ownership.

The IPO is no exit for the entrepreneur; it's the start of purgatory.

You have to have in mind what you want when you go public. It's not just an end in and of itself. Suddenly, you have investors to satisfy. Investors who want - who demand - a return.

We worked personally with a lot of great VCs. They just work incredibly hard at supporting entrepreneurs and their companies.

When I started in the business in 1999 and 2000, we had companies that were going public in two, three or four years.

I've been part of founding three companies that have gone public. It doesn't seem like a big number, but it's actually a lot.

When you are an entrepreneur, you have founded your own firm, it is so easy to find that you exist - you are the main shareholder of your company; it is very easy to look at the stock market position of your company to know how rich you are.

I basically see two reasons for a going public: Glencore gets access to more money. It is a way of funding your business and to finance growth. Plus: You have more liquid shares. It is easier to leave the company and redeem your shares. The 'going public' may also be an exit strategy for the top management.

You go public because you want access to capital in the form of debt and equity.

Even if a company is taken private, at some stage people want to make it public.

Do I regret taking the company public? Yes and no. Yes, because it put us under enormous pressure for a young company to go public at that point in its history, something you never could have done in the old days.

I met with several public company CEOs to learn about their experiences of going public and listened to as many earnings calls as I possibly could.

There's not a whole lot of advantage for a company to be public.

In every stump speech I give, I speak about the fact that people who dream and achieve enormous success do not make us poorer - they make us better off.

With a private company, you've got to get into who's investing and what's the balance sheet like. So going public is a positive thing from the perspective of the sales organization.

A lot of people offered me to go public, but I have always rejected it.

On the other hand, we raised $25 million by going public. It's that money that we used to build this company, to build the circulation, to build a high profile and to hire staff that made Salon what it is today.

I don't want to take a company public and not have it do extremely well and fail the public shareholder.

I want to go public because I have the right reason to go public - because the benefits outweigh the costs.