David Sze Quotes

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.

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

I've had two IPOs: with Etsy in 2015 and Cloudera in 2016. There have also been a ton of trade sales in my portfolio.

I took IMAX public back in the early '90s.

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

An IPO-mad technology boom made 'selling out' itself into an honorific.

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.

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

There is no country in the world where it's as easy to find venture capital in the stock market as the United States.

I wanted a CFO with public company experience; I needed an HR department, new office space, and a board which could help me grow the business. Insight, the private equity firm I chose, helped me with all that.

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

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.

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.

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.

There are positives and negatives to publicly traded and private companies.

The question for Dropbox is whether, when they run out of private sources for funding, they will be able to maintain that valuation when they go to public sources for funding and their valuation is set on the public markets.

2009 was one of the busiest, most insane, stressful periods in my entire career. I was raising a bunch of money, buying a bunch of Twitter. I saw my friend fired as CEO of Twitter. Uber was growing like a weed. As these companies get bigger and bigger, there's more and more friction. Being public was the last thing I wanted to do at the time.

Facebook could have gone public whenever it wanted. We decided the right time was 2012. It could have easily been 2010 or 2014.

I think Wall Street is very important, especially to tech companies. Wall Street will get in their rhythm and go fund tech companies, and tech companies will go create jobs and employ a lot of people, so there's that aspect of Wall Street.

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.

But we have to ask ourselves, what's the purpose of the stock market? It's supposed to be a source of capital for growing business. It's lost that purpose.

I think one thing that may have happened with both Facebook and Zynga is that they may have waited too long to go public. They got particularly cute on that front.