RingCentral's founders explain how to prepare a SaaS company for IPO. Start financial forecasting early, track bookings and retention metrics, and run like a public company before going public. Missing a quarterly target as a public company has severe consequences, so adopt that discipline from the start.
So when you're leading up to doing an IPO, I mean, when do you start projecting for that? When is the time that you start crunching the numbers to say, OK, we've got to start really taking serious thought at this now?
Look, we were always about crunching the numbers. The company is analytical in nature. And again, it's recurring revenue, so there is a small set of fairly well-understood metrics, your bookings, recurring revenue, retention, gross retention, net retention, things like that, that kind of people have been looking at for a long time. But it's a completely different standard and level of scrutiny as a public company. [Speaker] Yeah. [Speaker] And this is one of the advices we got from investors, which was spot on, was, why don't you guys run like a public company before you're public? And I was—
And what did they mean by running like a public company?
Exactly, that's what I said. That sounds really good. What do you mean? So run like a public company means have full predictability, certainly through the year, but have a multi-year plan and see how you're tracking against that. Because what's happening— I don't know how many people here are public or close to public, being public, whatever. What I can tell you is that public markets, unlike your investors— I made this corny analogies like marriage, whatever— but they're kind of like family. In the end, they are in your court. And in the end, founders are hard to come by. And they'll support you. Public markets are very, very different. With public markets, they're completely unforgiving. You cannot miss a quarter. Knock on wood— or this is not wood, whatever.
Yeah, thanks, Yuri.
But we've been public for— 21 quarters now, 5+ years. We haven't missed one.
