Bill Gurley Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

It's nice to do an IPO where your investors get value straightaway and the share price pops up; it proves you left something on the table for them.

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

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

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

The usual reason companies are funded or valued on the stock market for not having a current profit is because the investors believe there will be a future profit.

If I ever took a business public, I wouldn't want to take the shares off the table. I don't want people thinking I'm doing it just to make money and then going to run for the hills. I think that's a very important distinction.

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.

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.

Going public today is fraught with peril on many levels. One is earnings guidance. If you miss guidance, the stock price becomes very volatile. Short sellers can put a tremendous downward pressure on the stock.

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.

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.

When we took Netscape public, if people wanted to invest in the web, that was the only stock that they could do it by investing in. So Netscape's market value was higher than it probably otherwise would have been if there were lots of other ways to play that theme.

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

The JOBS Act is the 'topic of the moment.'