Brian Schatz Quotes

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.

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.

Don't go public before you can be public.

If you're the CEO of a publicly traded company, you're worried about quarterly returns.

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

I think businesses live longer that are on the stock market.

I think most CEOs think their stock is undervalued, probably.

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 hope we’re on the road to more truth-telling to investors.

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

When you are an entrepreneur, you have founded your own firm, it is so easy to find that you exist - you are the main shareholder of your company; it is very easy to look at the stock market position of your company to know how rich you are.

When you're public, you're at the mercy of the markets. You can be doing extremely well, but if the markets are in the tank or your industry is in the tank, you don't get rewarded for it.

But we have to ask ourselves, what's the purpose of the stock market? It's supposed to be a source of capital for growing business. It's lost that purpose.

I think you have to learn that there's a company behind every stock, and that there's only one real reason why stocks go up. Companies go from doing poorly to doing well or small companies grow to large companies.

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

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.

Being a public company is really terrible for most companies. I'd say Facebook and Google have done a pretty good job of standing up to the incredible quarterly pressure to hit numbers, but most companies - and I've observed a lot now - don't do a very good job of that.

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.

Respect public investors and treat them as partners and important constituents.

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.

Publicly traded United States companies report sales and profits to investors every quarter.

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

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.