RingCentral's founders discuss preparing for an IPO. Start financial projections years early, track subscription metrics like net retention, and adopt a public-company mindset because public markets demand strict quarterly performance and less forgiveness than private investors.
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, okay, we 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 your current revenue. So there is a small set of fairly well understood metrics. Your bookings, recurrent 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. 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 like I was.
And what did they mean by running like a company?
Exactly, that's what I said. That sounds really good. Like, what do you mean? You know, so run like a public company means have full predictability, you know, 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, like I made this corny analogy, it's 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, things.
But we've been public for 21 quarters now, five plus years. We haven't missed one.
