

How to Be a Public Company CEO - breck
http://www.ryanallis.com/how-to-be-a-public-company-ceo/

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mlinsey
Out of curiosity, what would this list have looked like before Sarbanes-Oxley?
Everyone always says about how that made it more difficult to go public.

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breck
Not sure but he did mention that it costs a public company $2M a year in legal
and other bills just for SO.

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JoelSutherland
Ryan runs icontact.com -- I've heard they've been interested in going public
for a while. It is interesting to hear what Ryan had to say about the process.

Perhaps their biggest competitor, Constant Contact, went public last year.

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csl
A thing I didn't quite get, under The Advantages to Being Public:

> an ability to command a higher revenue multiple than most private companies
> can

Can someone explain this?

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browser411
I think he meant the ability to have higher valuation, which often is cited as
a multiple of revenue, EBIDTA, etc. For instance, a publicly traded company
will tend to have a higher valuation than a private one b/c it is more liquid
and stockholders can cash out on some stock exchange at any time.

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jond2062
You hit the nail on the head. When valuing a privately held company, an
investor will almost always apply a discount for lack of marketability because
unlike 100 shares of stock in say IBM, for example, an investor doesn't have
an easily available market to quickly sell their shares in a private company.

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davidw
Funny seeing the comment from Dave Sifry. We were more or less weeks/months
away from an IPO at Linuxcare, hot on the heels of Redhat and VA Linux...
then, _poof_.

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lyime
Not anytime soon. Still a great read ;)

