Initial Public Offering Quotes

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 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.

There is no correlation between a weak IPO market and an impact on early-stage VCs.

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

If I owned any of these Hot New Issues that have doubled, tripled, quintupled or umptupled within days and in some cases hours after they were issued, I most certainly would grab my fabulous windfall, thank my lucky stars and invest the money. It's utter nonsense to think any newly issued stock is really worth two, ten or 20 times the [offering] price.... A management so stupid as to sell shares [cheap], and an underwriter so obtuse as not to discern the real value, together would provide reason enough for a sensible man to get rid of his shares.

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.

Today Facebook went public, just as Myspace's last user went private.

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

When Facebook went public, they didn't have a particularly strong model of governance.

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

An IPO is like a negotiated transaction - the seller chooses when to come public - and it's unlikely to be a time that's favourable to you.

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

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

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

The reason to go public is that it is a massive branding, marketing, credibility, trust-building exercise with your customers, and then it allows you to consolidate power and scale and market share. Do we want to be a huge company with a huge impact? If the answer to that is yes, the only way that that happens is by going public. It is effectively a branding event that catalyzes interest. It helps with recruiting, it helps with marketing, it helps with sales. It just helps on many dimensions. I think it's basically a litmus test for the CEO's ambition.