David Cohen Quotes

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

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.

The most important thing for us is investing and making companies great, and then they have all the options they want, whether that's to go public or stay private.

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

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

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

I have never seen Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, or Reed Hastings complain about being public. Nor have they ever argued that being public prevented them from doing things with a long-term focus.

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 wish we could be private with Tesla. It actually makes us less efficient to be a public company.

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

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

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

I hated being a public company CEO.

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

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

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.

It is much more convenient not to be a public company. As a private company you don't have to give information to the public. Secrecy is an important factor of success in the commodity business.

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.

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

The good parts about being a public company are increased discipline, increased execution and increased transparency to make sure that you are really building a company for a hundred years.

Clearly as you move to being a public company, probably even more than growth, there is a huge value based on predictability.

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

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

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.

If you're going to run a public company, be absolutely certain of what the parameters are, what the clarity is, that you can explain it to yourselves and explain it externally.