Martin Naughton Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

I hated being a public company CEO.

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.

Innovation and corporate governance are extremely important to improve the profitability of Japanese companies and encourage them to increase wages, capital spending, and dividends.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Every public company depends to some extent on the trust of its investors.

One of the things that may get lost among all the hubbub when a company is 'going public' is that the business can now be owned, in part, by its greatest fans.