Google Files for IPO 408
bobwyman manages to be the first to submit this story, apparently by using his own web service: "Well, the PubSub.com SEC Edgar notification system just sent a message a few minutes ago saying that Google has finally filed their S-1 to go public. See: Google's S-1 which was accepted by the SEC at 2004-04-29T13:53:49-04:00. If you had had a PubSub.com SEC Edgar subscription, you would have been one of the first to see this filing."
More information (Score:5, Informative)
"In the filing, Google said that it generated revenues of $961.9 million in 2003 and reported a net profit of $106.5 million. Sales rose 177 percent from a year ago although earnings increased by just 6 percent." - LISnews.com [lisnews.com].
More stories are available from CNN [cnn.com] and The Associated Press [nwsource.com].
And for a less lame link... (Score:3, Informative)
The Most Info (Score:5, Informative)
Text of the Filing (Score:2, Informative)
Risks (Score:5, Informative)
Risks Related to Our Business and Industry
[...]
We face significant competition from Microsoft and Yahoo.
We face competition from other Internet companies, including web search providers, Internet advertising companies and destination web sites that may also bundle their services with Internet access.
Re:About fucking time. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Too much hype (Score:5, Informative)
Re:IPO - not a great idea... (Score:2, Informative)
"As a private company, we have concentrated on the long term, and this has served us well. As a public company, we will do the same," the letter states.
"In our opinion, outside pressures too often tempt companies to sacrifice long-term opportunities to meet quarterly market expectations. Sometimes this pressure has caused companies to manipulate financial results in order to 'make their quarter.' In Warren Buffett's words, 'We won't smooth quarterly or annual results: If earnings figures are lumpy when they reach headquarters, they will be lumpy when they reach you."
Upcoming Open Source Alternative to Google... (Score:5, Informative)
Search engine built on Open Source technologies and will never have to worry about coming too corporate.
Goal is to use an open api, open algorithm and disclose everything there is about search and search technologies. Will even be launching a blog shortly.
Well, this isn't about the Google IPO, but it is about an open source project with ambitions to play the game google does without all the corporate mumbo jumbo and no need to IPO.
Index is about 50 million pages during beta but we are about to roll out our 250 million page corpus.
Let us know what you think
Rich get Richer (Score:2, Informative)
NY TIMES article for the registration impaired.
Google Goes Public? The Rich Get Richer By GARY RIVLIN
tiger Woods has his small stake. So do Shaquille O'Neal, Henry A. Kissinger and Arnold Schwarzenegger. All can be counted among that small club of people lucky enough to own a sliver of Google, one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley and what could be the hottest deal on Wall Street this year.
Michael S. Ovitz, once a top Hollywood agent, pulled strings in an effort to enter a pool that was being offered to a group of rich investors and would eventually own a small piece of Google. But that was in the late 1990's, and apparently his star was already fading. Mr. Ovitz was turned away.
The question of if and when Google, the world's most popular search engine, might finally proceed with an initial offering of shares to the public has captivated Silicon Valley in recent days. That is because it nears a deadline this week to provide a financial disclosure document required under the 1934 securities law.
The company has not declared its intentions, but Google is the most anticipated public offering since the dot-com bubble burst four years ago.
People speculate. People dream. And if the numbers are to be believed, people will drool. The current prediction is that Google, if it decides to sell shares to investors this year, would probably end up with a market value of $20 billion to $25 billion by the end of its first day as a publicly traded company.
A $25 billion market value would instantly make Google worth more than Lockheed Martin, the big military contractor; Federal Express, the package delivery service; or Nike, the sports clothing maker.
As a great many people have learned the hard way in recent years, things don't always happen as the experts predict, especially when a company is involved in the high-risk realm of technology.
"It's bound to happen," Andy Bechtolsheim, who was the first person outside the company to invest in Google, said of the long-awaited public offering. Mr. Bechtolsheim, a founder of Sun Microsystems, said he owns a little more than 1 percent of Google. Assuming a huge opening day, the $200,000 he invested in Google in 1998 could be worth at least $300 million. Not everyone would fare as well. Many own a small stake in Google through an investment syndicate that included lots of Internet failures, and would stand to make only a modest profit on their total investment, if anything.
The list of those expected to profit handsomely if Google proceeds with an initial public offering certainly includes the usual suspects. Start with the company's two young founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who started Google as graduate students at Stanford and are known affectionately as "the boys" among Silicon Valley insiders.
Mr. Brin and Mr. Page, now in their early 30's, together own an estimated one-third to one half of Google, depending on which insider's number deserves credence.
"In a way, it doesn't make a difference whether the boys own a third of the company or half," said a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who spoke on the condition he not be identified because Google is a secretive company. "We're all living in a Google world now. You can safely say," he said, that "both of them will be worth in the many billions."
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital, the two venture capital firms that invested in Google in June 1999, just as Google was becoming a daily tool of the digital elite, each own 11 percent to 14 percent of the company, several Silicon Valley venture capitalists say.
The list of institutions that stand to make a small fortune from Google includes two of its potential rivals, America Online, now part of Ti
More info on an auction of the google kind (Score:2, Informative)
Long Live Google! (Score:5, Informative)
In an unusual provision for a technology company, Google will create two classes of shares with different voting rights, a move that aims to guarantee founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will maintain decision-making authority...
"In our opinion, outside pressures too often tempt companies to sacrifice long-term opportunities to meet quarterly market expectations. Sometimes this pressure has caused companies to manipulate financial results in order to 'make their quarter.' In Warren Buffett's words, 'We won't smooth quarterly or annual results: If earnings figures are lumpy when they reach headquarters, they will be lumpy when they reach you."
The founders have also fought to maintain their control over the company even as it hired Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt in 2000. According to the document, Page and Brin said that they will run the company as a "triumvirate."
Google going in many directions (Score:2, Informative)
What will they think of next?
Google IPO links (Score:4, Informative)
That site has been around for a while, a unofficial google ipo watch.
Useful.
Are you worried google will loose focus? (Score:5, Informative)
This will stop your worries
In an unusual provision for a technology company, Google will create two classes of shares with different voting rights, a move that aims to guarantee founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will maintain decision-making authority. Such structures have proven beneficial in media companies, such as The New York Times, the filing states.
So this mean Larry and Sergey will still drive Google and everyone knows how they work. I don't think they will just react how wall street wants them to react.
WARNING LINK NOT WORK SAFE (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Rollercoaster Time (Score:3, Informative)
News.com.com reports [com.com] that you are wrong. To quote:
In an unusual provision for a technology company, Google will create two classes of shares with different voting rights, a move that aims to guarantee founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will maintain decision-making authority...
"In our opinion, outside pressures too often tempt companies to sacrifice long-term opportunities to meet quarterly market expectations. Sometimes this pressure has caused companies to manipulate financial results in order to 'make their quarter.' In Warren Buffett's words, 'We won't smooth quarterly or annual results: If earnings figures are lumpy when they reach headquarters, they will be lumpy when they reach you."
The founders have also fought to maintain their control over the company even as it hired Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt in 2000. According to the document, Page and Brin said that they will run the company as a "triumvirate."
Post-NASDAQ-crash IPO looms, Congrats! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Too much hype (Score:2, Informative)
Ticker (Score:2, Informative)
Read the ****in' manual! (Score:1, Informative)
LONG TERM FOCUS
As a private company, we have concentrated on the long term, and this has served us well. As a public company, we will do the same. In our opinion, outside pressures too often tempt companies to sacrifice long-term opportunities to meet quarterly market expectations. Sometimes this pressure has caused companies to manipulate financial results in order to "make their quarter." In Warren Buffett's words, "We won't 'smooth' quarterly or annual results: If earnings figures are lumpy when they reach headquarters, they will be lumpy when they reach you."
If opportunities arise that might cause us to sacrifice short term results but are in the best long term interest of our shareholders, we will take those opportunities. We will have the fortitude to do this. We would request that our shareholders take the long term view.
Many companies are under pressure to keep their earnings in line with analysts' forecasts. Therefore, they often accept smaller, but predictable, earnings rather than larger and more unpredictable returns. Sergey and I feel this is harmful, and we intend to steer in the opposite direction.
1 Much of this was inspired by Warren Buffett's essays in his annual reports and his "An Owner's Manual" to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders.
Google's Release? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:More information (Score:3, Informative)
Investors will be able to get a slice of the profits (assuming Google ever pays a dividend), but they won't run the show.
Re:About fucking time. (Score:2, Informative)
I plan to buy short.
Uh, you mean *sell* short don't you? You can't short until a couple months have passed.
There's nothing magical in Google technology and services.
The stock market rewards revenue growth, not "magicalness" .. what's magical about Microsoft, or GE, or other big successful companies?
It looks like Google is turning a good profit these days. And they have a corporate structure that looks like it will help keep them doing what they do best. I'm going to take a look at a their *financial statements* to decide if they are worth investing in (or shorting, or trading options). And I probably won't touch it until next year (a good company is worth owning at any time).
Re:More information (Score:5, Informative)
They have over 1900 employees [google.com]. Assuming a typical high-tech business cost of $100-200k per employee (salary + rent + computer + etc...), that's at least $190-380 million in revenue. Then you throw in their big-ass computer farms, their funky colorful office spheres [google.com], and their Grateful Dead chef [google.com]... then $980 million sounds reasonable.
Dave
Re:More information (Score:2, Informative)
have a nice day
and grow, although used incorrectly, is a verb
Main Entry: grow
Pronunciation: 'grO
Function: verb
thanks
You can particpate in the IPO - its Dutch Auction (Score:3, Informative)
More details are here [investors.com]
-Zipwow
Re:For the minions (Score:3, Informative)
> Of course, the value is going to jump many
> thousands of percent in the first minute of
> trading,
No it's not, the whole idea of a Dutch auction IPO is to avoid that.
Google also filed form 10-12G (Score:2, Informative)
bob wyman
CTO, PubSub Concepts, Inc.
http://pubsub.com
Re:More information (Score:5, Informative)
1. The stock class they are selling to the public will not have voting rights. The founders will keep those so that they keep control.
2. They explicitly state that they don't plan to ever pay any dividends.
So what exactly do you get for buying their stock again, besides knowing you own part of the company and hoping someone else wants to know that for themselves in the future?
I mean, I love Google and all (and they make me a lot of money every day through Adsense and free search traffic), but where's the incentive to purchase their stock?
Got to say that this is an awesome racket for the founders to bring in a ton of cash for themselves and their business without giving anything up in exchange, since all the profits just go right back into the company or anywhere else they decide them want the cash to go to.
Re:More information (Score:3, Informative)
Also, there is this qualification process: "Before you can submit a bid, you will be required to qualify by obtaining a unique bidder ID and by meeting an underwriter's account eligibility and suitability requirements," but I suspect that's less to keep it in the club than to weed out the types of frivolous bids that drive up joke eBay items like "Sense of Decency, hardly used" to seventeen thousand dollars.
Re:More information -err, no way on those salaries (Score:3, Informative)
Take the 2003 column, add up the Costs and Expenses section, minus the Cost of Revenues, then divide by the number of employees (1907).
This gives $261k per employee.
If you want proof that I added the correct numbers, look at the filing, p.42-46, and you'll see that those items are primarily the employee salaries and other employee costs. There are other non-employee costs in the Sales and marketing section, such as advertising and promotional expenditures, but they are not listed as primary items. A portion of the Cost of Revenues could be arguably included as well, but I wasn't sure of the split between the cost of their data centers, and the labor associated with their operation. Therefore, I did not include them. The non-inclusion of the labor costs here would help offset the inclusion of the non-primary items in the Sales and marketing category above.
You can also do the same thing for the first quarter of 2004 (see balance sheet), extrapolating to $380k per employee for the year. Note that on p.39, the headcount is 1907 as of March 31, 2004.
Therefore, $380,000 per employee is a more accurate figure.
Google is not likely the type of company where clerical and data-entry people outnumber the engineers / computer scientists.
Oh yeah, add in the full Cost of Revenues number and you'll get the "total cost of business" you were talking about.
Dave