Clearly as you move to being a public company, probably even more than growth, there is a huge value based on predictability.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
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.
In my experience, there are only two valid reasons to take a company public: access to growth capital and investor fatigue.
I definitely see a correlation between how many things a company gets right and how fast a company grows.
There's not a whole lot of advantage for a company to be public.
Many newly public companies are able to post a year or two of strong sales growth off a small base, but their growth almost always slows over time, thanks to what investment professionals call 'the law of large numbers.'
Growing is an important part of the business, but more important than that is to get better.
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.
I don't think I'd enjoy running a public company. We haven't needed to go to the market to fund expansion.
I don't believe in public companies... I would prefer to risk my own money, make any necessary changes fast and grow as quickly as possible.
And our size: The company this year is going to be close to $50 billion, so if that's the case and you can continue to grow that fast, I would rather put my energies to solving customer problems and growing our business than worrying about integrating and laying people off.