Daniel Lyons Quotes

The question for Dropbox is whether, when they run out of private sources for funding, they will be able to maintain that valuation when they go to public sources for funding and their valuation is set on the public markets.

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.

During the 2000 bubble, many companies rushed to go public before they had any revenue.

For decades, Wall Street has charged companies a standard fee of 7 percent to sell their shares to the public.

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

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.

There is no correlation between a weak IPO market and an impact on early-stage VCs.

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.

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

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.

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.

Most troublesome is the legalization of 'crowd funding,' the ability of start-up companies to raise capital from small investors on the Internet.

The first thing I ever invested in was Twitter. Blaine Cook, former CTO, was leaving the company and asked me if I wanted to buy his stock.

Once the brokerage house, rather than the bank, became the locus for American savings, that money would find its way into the stock market, because the broker was someone with a much higher tolerance for risk than the banker.

There are several things that can create an alpha - stock buybacks are one. High dividend yields are another, especially nowadays because the stock market yields more than the banks and the tenure treasury. But by and large, it tends to be companies with a strong cash flow, rising sales, accelerated earnings, a profit margin expansion.

Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.

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

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

There is always risk involved. You can't be a capitalist only when there are investment profits but then a socialist when you experience losses.

In order to access private capital, you have to provide competitive return on investment. In order to give competitive returns to investors, you've got to operate on a profitable basis and be thinking of yourself as a business.

Chasing revenues that don't have good earnings doesn't help us or shareholders one lick.

Business 2.0 was hugely profitable last year, and will be profitable this year.

If your business had no risk, you could go get a bank loan and call it a day. VCs like risks - without them, venture capital wouldn't exist. But they need to be risks that VCs are good at assessing and managing.

What the investment community does like is short-term measures designed to boost share prices.