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.
Whether you stay private or go public, after all is said and done, a CEO's job is to create lasting shareholder value.
I think one thing that may have happened with both Facebook and Zynga is that they may have waited too long to go public. They got particularly cute on that front.
Venture-backed startups with billion dollar market caps are called 'unicorns' because they are supposed to be rare mythical creatures that few entrepreneurs will ever ride.
We actually tried to invest in Twitter in April 2007, right when it launched. At the time, the company was wary of having a classic, tier-one traditional venture firm involved.
There is no correlation between a weak IPO market and an impact on early-stage VCs.
There are positives and negatives to publicly traded and private companies.
Do I regret taking the company public? Yes and no. Yes, because it put us under enormous pressure for a young company to go public at that point in its history, something you never could have done in the old days.
Clearly as you move to being a public company, probably even more than growth, there is a huge value based on predictability.
It's a special thing to be a public company.
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.
I invested in Uber in 2011 when it was only in San Francisco.
While Wall Street firms typically underwrite offerings in teams, the lead underwriter, or manager, of the offering has primary responsibility for selling the offering and reaps much of the fees and profit.
On the other hand, we raised $25 million by going public. It's that money that we used to build this company, to build the circulation, to build a high profile and to hire staff that made Salon what it is today.
With tech startups, it's all loose-goosie. You raise money as you go, often from friends, family and investors.
There's not a whole lot of advantage for a company to be public.
The JOBS Act will allow entrepreneurs to utilize 'crowdfunding,' which permits them to raise equity capital from a large pool of small investors.
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.
One of the things that may get lost among all the hubbub when a company is 'going public' is that the business can now be owned, in part, by its greatest fans.
Was I going to start companies outside of Shutterstock or inside? Going public kind of meant I was going to start them inside, and I kind of thought this through and decided that if I was going to do that, I was going to continue to operate Shutterstock like it was an incubator of startups.
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.
Don't go public before you can 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've actually taken companies public, I've actually busted companies, I've actually gone broke.
You can't have personal investors anymore because it's too expensive, so you have to have corporate investment or a lot of rich people.
