We couldn't buy Google on the IPO, but I knew I wanted to own it. I was gonna go big. It came out and went down a bit. I got distracted by something and didn't get in.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
My smartest move was joining Google. It wasn't obvious at the time that it would be a good decision. A lot of people, many of my friends, advised me against it.
The turning point for me was realizing that I would learn more at Google, trying to build a company, regardless of whether we failed or succeeded, than I would at any of the other companies I had offers from.
The reason that Google was such a success is because they were the first ones to take advantage of the self-organizing properties of the web. It's in ecological sustainability. It's in the developmental power of entrepreneurship, the ethical power of democracy.
Google was a venture-funded company. Being part of that brings an energy to the company.
The IPO is no exit for the entrepreneur; it's the start of purgatory.
The story of Google is just when everyone concluded that a search engine would never make any money, everyone backed out of it, and Google walked into that vacuum and dominated.
Google attempted to run a search engine in China, and they ended up giving up.
Google worries - and rightly so - about how hard it is for a big company to come up with the next hot thing.
We will never sell or have an IPO. What that does is suddenly flushes you with cash. It makes you now work for a group of stockholders, who, again, put pressure and temptations on your true-blueness.
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.