Brian Acton Quotes

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 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.

Whether you stay private or go public, after all is said and done, a CEO's job is to create lasting shareholder value.

This is a bit like big-game hunting. You look for companies of a certain size that deserve to be public.

I don't think I'd enjoy running a public company. We haven't needed to go to the market to fund expansion.

The best thing is to go public only when you're absolutely sure that's the right move for the company. And in order to make sure that is the case, you need to have as much control over the company as possible, which means not giving up control early on.

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.

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

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.

It's a special thing to be a public company.

Business chief executive officers and their boards succumb to the pressures of the financial markets and their fears of takeovers and pour out their energies to produce quarterly earnings - at the expense of building their companies for the long term.

One thing I'm so grateful for is sidestepping the usual venture capital, private equity route. My friends who have gone that way are many times beholden to their boards of directors, to 'sell' ideas to a team.

Going public for the sake of going public is not really an optimal thing. You're going public because as a company you believe it is the right thing to do and it will benefit the ability of the company to achieve its long-term objectives.

The reason for looking at a public listing instead of private capital is that I have always enjoyed running a public limited company.

Going public is one step in the life cycle of a company; it's not the last step.

M&A is always an opportunistic tool to grow a company.

I went public in 2002 in America, and do you know what Wall Street valued my concession in Macau at? Zero.

I love using a targeted acquisition approach in conjunction with a business that has a clear strategy and strong organic growth.

Mitt Romney understands free enterprise, he has worked in it. He has seen companies succeed and he has seen them fail, too. He knows what people think about when they invest their money.

I've spent a lot of time studying corporations and what makes them tick.

There will come a time and place it will be appropriate for us to consider going public.

If you don't have a VP Finance on your team reporting to you, do yourself, your team, and your investors a favor and go hire one right now.

For all founders, going public is a momentous milestone that has to be experienced to be fully understood. It is the culmination of years of hard work and personal sacrifice.

The better side of Wall Street is when it is acting as an efficient mechanism of capital formation and capital flow, which helps businesses invest.

I got an album concept called 'Exit Strategy,' that might be one of my last ones. It's a term they use in business when you build companies. You create an exit strategy as you make a company. You don't wait till you're five years in it; you create a exit strategy as you make the company.