During the 2000 bubble, many companies rushed to go public before they had any revenue.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When I started in the business in 1999 and 2000, we had companies that were going public in two, three or four years.
In 2000, just before the first dot-com bubble burst, it cost a whopping $5 million to launch a tech startup.
But the minute we went public on the stock market, which is how our wealth was created, it was no longer how many people you employed, it was how much you were worth and how much your company was worth.
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.
In my experience, there are only two valid reasons to take a company public: access to growth capital and investor fatigue.
Remember, 2000 was the year of the dot-com bust. The telecom industry lost about $2 trillion in market capital at that time.
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.
The IT bubble is the IT bubble, and of course, we became a company that contracted dramatically in 2001 and 2002: we basically came down by 45,000 people - a dramatic ramp-down.
Even if a company is taken private, at some stage people want to make it public.
There's not a whole lot of advantage for a company to be public.
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