Aileen Lee Quotes

There was a time when a company could not sell its shares to the public unless its revenues were growing and it was turning a profit. Companies that lost money were deemed too risky for public investors.

I've had two IPOs: with Etsy in 2015 and Cloudera in 2016. There have also been a ton of trade sales in my portfolio.

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.

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.

Venture capital is about capturing the value between the startup phase and the public company phase.

The vast majority of companies don't go public and mint dozens of millionaires. And most companies don't go around doling out stock options; private companies tend to be very tight about ownership.

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.

If WikiLeaks were a for-profit company, determining its real value would be a nearly impossible task.

I always wanted to start a public company and make a lot of money.

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

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

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

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

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.

I think Salesforce, going public very early on before they were profitable, it made a lot of sense for them because it got customers comfortable that these guys were going to have capital and be transparent about their business.

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

Of all the big Internet companies, Yahoo is the most highly valued on a price-earnings and price-sales basis.

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

For all founders, going public is a momentous milestone that has to be experienced to be fully understood. It is the culmination of years of hard work and personal sacrifice.

The stock market clearly values companies that can deliver disruptive innovation.

In an era of endless innovation and constant disruption, what is any company really worth? How does a startup determine its valuation?

Since 2011, Groupon has lost $730 million, and Zynga has lost just over $1 billion. Twitter has been in business for 10 years and went public in 2013. Since then, the company has lost $2 billion.

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