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.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I've been part of founding three companies that have gone public. It doesn't seem like a big number, but it's actually a lot.
I moved back to Boston and joined some of my Harvard classmates at Bain & Co. I quickly realized I enjoyed business.
There's not a whole lot of advantage for a company to be public.
This is a bit like big-game hunting. You look for companies of a certain size that deserve to be public.
Well, anything you want to make public is your public business.
It's a special thing to be a public company.
When I started in the business in 1999 and 2000, we had companies that were going public in two, three or four years.
I have observed private and proprietary colleges, like the University of Phoenix, and the market they serve. And I found it intriguing the way in which they are trying to deliver the product, with more accountability, for a price.
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.
Even if a company is taken private, at some stage people want to make it public.