Thursday, April 29, 2004

Google IPO

Unless you have been living under a rock or in a cave you have heard about Google's impending IPO. Well, today it became official that Google will go public with the filing of its S1 with the SEC. There will certainly be hundreds of blog postings and news articles about the impending offering, so I won't bore you with the basics. I will only try and highlight some of the facts that can probably won't be mentioned in most articles. I will also read through the S1 and post about the interesting statements I find there.

Interesting tidbits:
- The founders, Larry & Sergey combine for close to 31% ownership in the company
- CEO Eric Schmidt has a 6% ownership
- The VC firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital each have a 10% ownership
- There are two classes of shares, and a vote with a class B share counts as 10 votes while a class A share vote counts as only a single vote. This according the reports is intended to help fend off any unwanted takeover requests (hmmmm... I can't think of a single company with over $50 billion in cash that would want to buy Google, other than that small firm in Redmond)
- I can't wait to read the S-1, but here is a quick quote that makes me think it will be a fun read: "A management team distracted by a series of short-term targets is as pointless as a dieter stepping on a scale every half hour," ... this is what Page wrote in the S-1 in reference to why Google won't give quarterly profit advice.

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