David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. But I mean, companies that were IPO-ing before were averaging 3, 4, 5 years before they IPO’d. Facebook went 8, and had this total calamity on their hands. And, you know, we went through a pretty rough patch last year where there were just not a lot of tech IPOs and bleeding into early of this year. And, I think you can probably speak to this better than I can, but we’re definitely in a period where people are waiting longer now and that seems like you can kind of trace that back to Facebook. It's so interesting. I think one of the lessons that Silicon Valley and the tech world seems to have absorbed from the Facebook IPO is “don’t go public, it’s terrible”. The IPO was indeed terrible as we’ve said. But what’s so interesting is Zuck would be the first one to refute that. In his quote a year later at TechCrunch Disrupt, like it was great for the company, it forced them to really step up and play with the big boys, play in big boy land and big girl land. But the lesson that’s been taken is totally opposite. So, Ben, you were referencing this. I pulled some numbers on some well-known companies that went public before Facebook and how long between founding and when they went public. So, Zynga went public before Facebook, a couple months before, 4 ½ years from founding to IPO. Which is crazy to think about. Zynga was built on the back of exploiting opportunities within Facebook.…

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