David Duffield Quotes

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

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

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.

I hated being a public company CEO.

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

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

Regarding our links with the Russian government, Severstal is a private company with no government participation. We are answerable to our shareholders.

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.

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.

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.

There are positives and negatives to publicly traded and private companies.

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

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.

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.

If we're going to talk about our businesses, we're going to have to talk about them within the constraints of the disclosure rules, without giving guidance, because we're not going to give guidance, because we don't believe that it is a sensible game to play.

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.

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.

I think going public is a really smart thing to do.

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

What happens to a private company that comes out with a quarterly report and an annual report? It gives transparency. It talks of basic issues of governance and transactions with related parties.

I would rather be responsible and accountable and help to reward the public shareholders going ahead.