Going Public Quotes

When in doubt, one can rarely go wrong by going public.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

In my experience, there are only two valid reasons to take a company public: access to growth capital and investor fatigue.

I think going public should not be a goal and the more that we make it a goal, the less it will be a goal. It's kind of like, I have three young children and when I tell them to eat vegetables, the last thing they will ever do is eat vegetables. I think it's just this weird thing where entrepreneurs have a reflexive negative reaction when people are pushing for it. I think you have to view going public for what it is, which is a transitional moment where you can consolidate mindshare and win at an even larger scale.

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.

Personally, I do not look at IPOs for an exit.

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

I think Salesforce, going public very early on before they were profitable, it made a lot of sense for them because it got customers comfortable that these guys were going to have capital and be transparent about their business.

One of the questions I've always hated answering is how do people make money in open source. And I think that Caldera and Red Hat - and there are a number of other Linux companies going public - basically show that yes, you can actually make money in the open-source area.

Going public is 18-month process, while an acquisition is a 6-month process. Going public means going under so much scrutiny, regulatory approval, auditing, magnified 10 times. Having the stomach to do that isn't necessarily in my DNA. My DNA is building a product and a service.

I don't think we would still be here if we hadn't gone public.

In China, going public has a cachet from a branding standpoint. It will improve our image to ad agencies, government regulators.

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.

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.

I think companies psych themselves out and say, 'Now that we're public, we've got to get all stuffy. We've got to be a certain way,' and the entrepreneurial spirit dies. What you got to keep alive is the intimacy, the energy, this crazed sense of purpose.

I don't understand why young entrepreneurs feel this pressure to take venture capital or go public. Don't get me wrong: Public companies are A-OK with me. I just think there is another way. Staying private is a lot more sane.