

Hey, Sarbanes and Oxley, You Killed Our IPO Market--Are You Happy? - parker
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/3/hey_sarbanes_and_oxley_you_killed_our_ipo_market_are_you_happy_

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maximilian
This is going to sound a bit stand-offish (or trollish), but I'm sorta glad
that its hard to go public with a company. Thinking back to the slew of IPOs
of yesteryear that were all of companies that had no product or reasonable
revenue source, I'm glad that the current slew of new web 2.0/social
networking/etc web companies can't all go public. Letting your stock be bought
by the layman is a pretty serious event and shouldn't be done by just any
company - They should have staying power.

Right now, the people who are educated enough (VCs etc) to be taking the risk
in investing in these companies do anyway, and although it slows the growth of
these companies some because their influx of capitol is limited, it limits the
amount of normal laypeople that get caught up in the hype and make bad
investments.

That however does bring up an interesting point. Should the gov't protect
investors from their own silliness? Where should the gov't step in to protect
people from bad investments by means of regulation? The more I think about the
stock market and investing as it applies to the average person, the more I
don't get it. Stocks seems so arbitrary - Its price is just a result of the
collective sorta-independent opinions of all the people owning that stock. You
don't get anything from that stock. If I buy some stock of some company, the
company doesn't see that money, just some guy who sold it to me. And the stock
market is so fickle to bad news or analyst "advice". </rant>

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jyu
The numbers for IPO'ing and running a public company are now different post-
SOx. Even though M&A is now the preferred exit for internet/software
companies, are the number of M&A's really growing in number and dollars?
<http://blog.softtechvc.com/2006/04/vc_exits_mas_co.html>

"The cost of complying with SOX 404 impacts smaller companies
disproportionately, as there is a significant fixed cost involved in
completing the assessment...companies with less than $100 million in revenue
spent 2.55% [to stay compliant]."
<http://www.sec.gov/info/smallbus/acspc/acspc-finalreport.pdf>

"...Sarbanes Oxley costs a private company about $2 million to $5 million in
preparation to go public"
<http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=102632>

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carterschonwald
My understanding of IPOs is that you do an IPO if you want to raise money to
grow your company to the next level, could this just be because larger
companies are now simply more aggressive about purchasing small promising
companies?

