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Google Files for IPO
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."
i wonder what impact this will on it's company posture overall?
The Google IPO has been so hyped that I think the shares will be priced so high at the beginning that they will have no place to go but down.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
Bloomberg has info about IPO share auction:
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http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=100000
By becoming public, google loses the ability to continue with constant steady growth and innovative R&D. These things will invariably lead to short sighted planning by the management to "make the numbers" for the next quarter, 6 months, or year. "Growth" will be expected year after year - the innovative ideas that have made google so successful will give way.
No, I won't bid on a share. I would hope that the IPO never happens, as google is still a quality company. I would hate to see that all change.
Stop corporate
"If you had had a PubSub.com SEC Edgar subscription, you would have been one of the first to see this filing." - was this advertisement strictly necessary?
This stock is going to fly straight up for the first few months.
Then it's going to tank.
Then everyone will buy it at $1 a share.
It'll repeat this cycle for a while before stabilizing. In the meantime expect Ads to start flooding google.com as they try to meet their new quarter numbers as expected by share holders.
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 ... If you had had a PubSub.com SEC Edgar subscription, you would have been one of the first to see this filing."
Bobwyman, you are are true genius: you managed to graft your shameless plug to promote your site on an important-ish, but totally unrelated, piece of news, make it into one of the most blatant piece of advertisement article submission, and on top ot it manage to get the story accepted by the Slashdot crew. Brilliant! You are my all-time favorite astroturfer.
Note to Slashdot crew: nobody cares about PubSub. Do you guys own stock or something?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Hopefully a Google that has to start making decisions to "maximise shareholder value" won't be a Google that becomes less than what we have today.
Hardly a safe bet though. I wonder how high it will open (and then what it will drop to when the hype is over).
Google, once an independent company with nobody to answer to but themselves, must now face the money-grubbers of Wall Street and their indifference for technology in the face of profits. I'm not trying to troll....this is just MHO.
Most people don't know much about investing or even money in general.
More then a few outstanding ideas have died or at least not lived up to their potentials due to bad implementation, planning or management.
Myself I'm not convinced 1 that google is a long term financially sound company.
The IPO price will probaly be too high to justify what value they do have.
And most importantly. There are probaly more established companies with a history of performance that will offer a better return with less risk.
Speaking quite frankly here, if you don't have money you can piss away, don't bother with buying individual stocks.
Also, keep in mind that you have to pay a commission on purchase and on sale. So lets say you buy $500 worth of Google, and it goes up to $600. You pay $10.95/trade (Ameritrade, say). That's $78.10 profit. If you sold it within 18 months of buying it, you have to pay income taxes on that money, lets say that is 25%. That's $58.57 profit. (Actually, I don't remember if you can discount the commissions for tax purposes). That's around a 11% return. If you buy $1000, and it goes up to $1200, gives you $133 profit after the 25% taxes and commissions, a 13% gain. The more you invest, the less significant the commissions become.
If you insist, though, you don't have to spend all of the money in your brokerage account on stock. You can leave some in as cash. You probably won't earn interest on it, but since its only a few hundred dollars anyways, that shouldn't matter too much.
Btw, you may be interested in a service such as Sharebuilder. They can automatically debit a certain amount every month, and then buy fractional shares. It's like $12/month for the service, though.
I think those preaching "run out and spend all your money to buy Google stock because you'll get rich" need to sit back and think realistically for a few minutes.
The main thing to remember is: the 1990's are over. That was last decade, this is now. Over-inflated stock prices with P/E (Price to Earning) ratios that are ridiculous are mostly gone now. Sure, Google's stock will probably do ridiculously well for the first few months. However, if everyone thinks this, it will just be artificial inflation waiting to fall out as long-term investors realize that the stock price is way higher than it should be for their earnings. No matter how much some of us dislike Microsoft, would it make any sense for Google, whose earnings are only an inkling of Microsofts to have a stock price that soars far beyond Microsofts and through the roof to match the likes of what Intel and Amazon used to trade at (hundreds of dollars per share)?
Those are just a few of my thoughts. I plan on investing in Google but only as a long-term option, because I believe that they will do well in the long run, but that their stock price will be overly affected by "announcements" of new features etc. Their business model is fairly narrow (e-mail, search services / advertisements, price-searching etc...) and does not have many sources of revenue. Who knows, maybe they can get rich off the search boxes they sell to companies to use to search data on company networks?
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
You are better off organizing an Investment Club. $100-$200 is not really enough to start investing.
After you mortgage your house and before you buy Google shares, put some money on the side for a small tent.
I plan to buy short. Not much, perhaps 1K, just in order to put my money where my mouth is.
Quality of Google search engine results is getting worse, the email thing hasn't really taken off (although bad publicity has) and most of their money in near term is expected to come from these two. They already have a huge market share in Web searches (not much more space to grow), so the Gmail must take off if they're go maintain fast growth in 2004.
There's nothing magical in Google technology and services. True, it's been a revolutionary product/service so far, but its technology is already mature. Due to ever increasing CPU, networking, clustering and storage technologies, in two-three year time, a smart startup will be able to catch up with their search engine size within 2-3 month time. It will take couple of talented guys like the Googlers (there are smart people out there who don't work for Google yet), a better search algorithm (reasonable expectation) and some money for storage and bandwidth (who wouldn't invest couple of millions in a company that wants to beat Gogle).
Anybody can purchase it as soon as it goes public. Of course, the value is going to jump many thousands of percent in the first minute of trading, and if you're trading with a discount broker your odds of getting some before it peaks are very slim. You could put in a market order and get bled dry, or you could put in a limit order at a reasonable price that will never be filled.
The rich are going to get richer on this one, and the rest of us will just have to sit patiently. Because everyone assumes buying Google is a good idea, by the time your typical person has the opportunity to do so, it's not.
IMHO.
This article makes some HUGE assumptions, the biggest being that search is going to be commoditized. The thing that made google so great is that they were able to differentiate their searches as markedly better and drove customers to their site away from competitors... which allows them to charge more for their ads- considering that they are indeed making a ton of money off of this, I think their customers are quite happy. Really, I would say that half of the entries on the list are related to the fact they think search is easy and anyone can get into the business and excel at it.
The outsourcing item made me wonder how much the writer really understands the difficulty of implementing a search engine. You can outsource typical day to day applications, the easy stuff. Google is doing cutting edge work! This is not a case of putting 1000 monkeys in a room and youll be a leader at search, and if youre still not w/ 1000 monkeys, then just add 1000 more. Or popping out JSP pages.
Google does have a strategy to lock in customers-Gmail. #9, about profit extension is not completely baseless, but they are not extending so much as optimizing their core strength to new applications. If a car engine company makes specialized engines for airplanes or boats, thats not really "extending" to me. If they tried to make cars, then that is a different story.
#6 about pay per click advertising is off base, considering the nature of google's ads. They are non intrusive, and embedded in the dynamically generated html. it would be very difficult for these adds to be removed, and they are so unobtrusive most users are not bothered in the slightest by them.
Overall, I found the article quite lame. Competition is definitely a concern, but if youre buying google, youre really buying the idea that Google can do things better than its competitors- people still buy Ford and GM stock regardless of the competitive nature of the auto business.
I was hoping their proposed Maximum Aggregate Offering Price would be 1 x 10^100.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
It's also going to be several months before the IPO actually goes out.
half of the most skilled search engineers in the world work for Google.
Google collects degrees, so in that sense you're right. They have an obscene collection of people with degrees from famous colleges.
So, if you believe that prestige and degrees accurately qualify skill level or potential for brilliance, then you're right.
For those of us that remember that GWB got a degree from Yale and Einstein got a teaching certificate from a technical college - or perhaps that Microsoft employs an obscene collection of fantastically talented people working on theory that few others understand - perhaps we are not so willing to discard the perspective that performance, contributions and results are the standard of excellence rather than paper certificates.
"Who said "Don't be evil" ?"
Google did.
Let's hope they can convince shareholders to adopt that idea.
No, it's a bad business idea because then said company will have paid more for the stock than anyone else thinks it's worth. Which means that in the short-term, they could only possibly sell it at a loss. That's bad business.
Side note-Berkshire hathaway is planning to soak up as many shares are available. Woah. This should not just be a "side note". Are you sure about this, and where did you find this out?
how much they earn from the ipo is determined by how many shares of its own the company itself is going to sell, times the selling price of course. that's the $2.7B. the $20B is the estimated market cap after going public, which is total number of shares outstanding times current selling price.
Regardless of how we think Google might change as a result of going public, I think we should at the very least all celebrate the facts that 1) A good tech company can survive, thrive, and even get investor funding in the post dot com bomb world and 2)the creators and employees of Google are finally getting their just rewards. Yeah, they're going to make a boatload of money and that, of itself, is a very cool thing.
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"
I used to work for the company that pioneered this process for IPOs. Remember Andover.net? That's how they went public (but don't take that outcome as an omen). It's a great pricing model, and still leaves a bit of a first-day pop for the investors.
The gist of the process is that it prices the IPO so that the proceeds to the company are not diverted to institutional investors. In traditional IPOs the investment banker typically underprices the shares and allocates most of them to large institutional investors as a reward for holding large portfolios in-house. The first-day pop you saw in other IPOs is a sign of that underpricing (in addition to some irrational exuberance). If company X offers 100 shares at $10 per share, then the price shoots up in the aftermarket to $100, that means the company likely could have gone public at $100, raising 10x the revenue. The auction would price it closer to $100.
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
where's the incentive to purchase their stock?
It's the "Greater Fool" investment strategy:
No matter how much I pay for this stock, a greater fool than I will pay even more.
The parent poster makes the most important point that I've seen in this discussion.
Did I say a salary of $200k?
No... I said "cost of $100-200k per employee (salary + rent + computer + etc...)"
That's salary + office rent + computer hardware + computer software + health benefits + taxes + stock plan + 401k / RRSP + relocation + training + desk + chair + office supplies + phone bill + internet cost + everything else.
I was using a rough employee cost of 2x a typical salary of $50-100k. That 2x comes from what I understand from management at a large company at which I worked. If you want a web link to some other references, here ya go:
2.2x salary for a (use the 1.25x * 1.75x figures)
How much does an employee really cost?
Dave
FPGA, Wireless, ASIC, Verilog, VHDL, HW, 10yr exp, Team Lead, Ottawa (More? Email above. slashdotusername=dgmartin98 )
Let's focus on (2) since the discussion is about this. Technically you're right. However, even if the company never pays a dividend, at the end of time it will have to be liquidated. At that time you will cash in your share. It's this expectation that makes prices of shares go up even when they never pay dividends. And it doesn't matter if that time is 1000 years away: your children or the children of your children (of the people who bought your stocks) will get that cash.
What I am saying is that dividend policy has more to do with provision with the tax code than with things you say. In the long run, if dividend aren't payed the company's profits do not disappear in cyberspace: they are reinvested in the company, making its value go up.