Reid Hoffman: When to Go Public

So the question is, when do you decide to take the company public? So at some point when you have a group of employees and investors, everyone has invested in the company with the idea that they will have some liquidity in the stock. And so it's a when rather than an if. Well, hopefully if you're being successful enough. When you're a successful company, the question you're addressing is when. And so what you want to do is you want to build as much into the company culture, the momentum, you know, a kind of a solid team culture, business model, and all the rest of the stuff. And you want to get all that really established. You want to make it reliable enough that— because one of the requirements from the public market investors is that they understand it with a fairly high degree of precision. On a quarterly basis, you make it reliable enough that people go, okay, I can understand how this goes. And then you choose a time that's based on when it's good for your employees, when you may need to have liquidity for doing acquisitions or expanding the business. And that's kind of the logic which it goes. One of the things that's been happening more in Silicon Valley in the last 10 years, is it used to be that the marketing event of going public was really critical. And so you got there as soon as you could because it was a way of kind of being presented on the stage. And probably there's a certain class of companies where that's still true for. For the consumer internet companies, because they already touch usually hundreds of millions of people, they don't use it for that as much, for that kind of marketing vehicle by which they suddenly get a spotlight on the stage. As much as it, it's the natural timing in the progression of how you're building out the company.