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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."
"In the filing, Google said that it generated revenues of $961.9 million in 2003 and reported a net profit of $106.5 million. Sales rose 177 percent from a year ago although earnings increased by just 6 percent." - LISnews.com.
More stories are available from CNN and The Associated Press.
If you had had a Slashdot subscription, you would have been one of the first to see bobwyman's advertisement.
Google stock will go up, then down, then up, then become unpredictable. There, that ought to be vague enough.
w0000t! Does this mean they'll have the money for the moon base?
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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
Now, off to mortgage my house and buy some stock. I just hope they maintain quality of service that they have been providing for so long.
hrrm.
...promote their IPO on their main website? So far, they don't appear to be doing this... but wouldn't that pump up the price quickly? (IANA stock broker)
...try this one from the good old boys at .com.com.com.com.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Bloomberg has info about IPO share auction:
0 6& sid=aLjRy1totEDQ&refer=home
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
How long after the stock goes public will the general population be able to purchase some? What's the game plan for these people - is Google worth the buy?
mix_master_mike
vafrous
"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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Right from the horse's mouth. There's already a crapload of articles. Of note, they're doing a Dutch Auction IPO and want to earn $2.7B, although speculation puts this closer to $20B. The underwriters are Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Here's the actual text of Google's filing to the Security Exchange Commission
From the Introduction to the Letter from the Founders:
Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.
The coolest voice ever.
The initial option grants to many of our senior management and key employees are fully vested. Therefore, these employees may not have sufficient financial incentive to stay with us.
Many of our senior management personnel and other key employees have become, or will soon become, substantially vested in their initial stock option grants. While we often grant additional stock options to management personnel and other key employees after their hire dates to provide additional incentives to remain employed by us, their initial grants are usually much larger than follow-on grants. Employees may be more likely to leave us after their initial option grant fully vests, especially if the shares underlying the options have significantly appreciated in value relative to the option exercise price. We have not given any additional grants to Eric, Larry or Sergey. Larry and Sergey are fully vested, and only a small portion of Eric's stock is subject to future vesting.
Have you Meta Moderated t
... As if a million investors cried out in simultaneous orgasm,
1) An IPO is a huge distraction. I doubt, given the hype, they'll be able to stay focused on their competitors.
2) Their competitors are coming on strong. Y! is making gains in the space.
3) They could suffer from a huge brain drain. If the IPO is uber successful then a lot of folks will get very rich and leave.
That being said, I wouldn't mind having some $.25 fully-vested google options right about now...
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
Risks Related to Our Business and Industry
[...]
We face significant competition from Microsoft and Yahoo.
We face competition from other Internet companies, including web search providers, Internet advertising companies and destination web sites that may also bundle their services with Internet access.
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
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.
Looks like they're going with the share auction plan. Seems like the SEC filing is buried, but the key details seem to be:
1) Underwriters manage the auction
2) You pre-qualify, etc.
3)You bid (and can multiple bid - ie, one bid for 9K shares at $20, another bid for 1K shares at $40, you'll get 10K shares if the price is $15)
4)The reject "manipulative" or "speculative" bids
5)They calculate a clearance price that'd sell all the shares offered according to the bids, and accept bids accordingly
6)They determine whether to hand out all the shares bid, give everyone 80% of what they asked for, give the bid/little guys everything they asked for, or let original bid price determine who gets everything they asked for.
I'd be really interested in what some professional equity people think of this process, it seems really interesting to me.
I hope Google keep to their game-plan that's made them the best, and richest search engine in the world. I hope shareholders don't start voting for popups on the main page, and lots of links to cheap holiday deals.
Get your own free personal location tracker
From the SEC form:
Eric Schmidt Employment Agreement
We have entered into an employment agreement with Eric Schmidt, our chief executive officer. The agreement provides that Eric will receive a base salary of $250,000. Eric was also granted an option to purchase 14,331,708 shares of Class B common stock at an exercise price of $0.30 per share pursuant to this agreement and was permitted to purchase 426,892 shares of Series C preferred stock at a purchase price of $2.3425 per share.
How long does he have to wait until he can sell? I'm sure he's got the date circled on his calendar.
Casual Games/Downloads
Although of course this was inevitable, it is somewhat disheartening. Google will become a company that is steered by stockholders. As everybody knows, most stockholders don't care about being not evil, or really anything other than profit.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the guys who own Google currently like profit, but public companies are different. A stockholder wouldn't normally feel bad if the company they owned some fraction of used terabytes of user information for slightly shady practices. The only publicly held company I truly trust is Apple, and of course there's no logical reason for that.
- Allen Pike
Altering time, one time at a time.
This, of course, has some Underwriters worried, given that a fee in the range of 5% could yeild over 100 million dollars for an IPO such as google.
Many believe, however, that this will not indicate a trend due to the fact that this may be easy for google, because they are allready a household name. In most other cases, an auction will not be so easy.
Top ten reasons not buy Google IPO
http://www.mozdex.com :)
:)
Search engine built on Open Source technologies and will never have to worry about coming too corporate.
Goal is to use an open api, open algorithm and disclose everything there is about search and search technologies. Will even be launching a blog shortly.
Well, this isn't about the Google IPO, but it is about an open source project with ambitions to play the game google does without all the corporate mumbo jumbo and no need to IPO.
Index is about 50 million pages during beta but we are about to roll out our 250 million page corpus.
Let us know what you think
In other news, Microsoft has put aside half its cash reserves to purchase 51% of these new shares. Mass suicides and hysteria begin.
- Allen Pike
Altering time, one time at a time.
They will acquire Lycos.com now, of course.
Google CEO:
"Finally... after all these years Lycos and Hotbot will be mine. Muhahaha"
Middle-Management Grunt:
"Sir, the IPO has went through"
Google CEO:
"Ex-ce-llent... ready the fleet"
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.
I hope they get a "GOO" ticker symbol.
Sweet precious GOO.
Interesting El Reg article claiming Arnold Schwarzenegger Henry Kissinger and other dubious characters were offered first dibs on an IPO.
NY TIMES article for the registration impaired.
Google Goes Public? The Rich Get Richer By GARY RIVLIN
tiger Woods has his small stake. So do Shaquille O'Neal, Henry A. Kissinger and Arnold Schwarzenegger. All can be counted among that small club of people lucky enough to own a sliver of Google, one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley and what could be the hottest deal on Wall Street this year.
Michael S. Ovitz, once a top Hollywood agent, pulled strings in an effort to enter a pool that was being offered to a group of rich investors and would eventually own a small piece of Google. But that was in the late 1990's, and apparently his star was already fading. Mr. Ovitz was turned away.
The question of if and when Google, the world's most popular search engine, might finally proceed with an initial offering of shares to the public has captivated Silicon Valley in recent days. That is because it nears a deadline this week to provide a financial disclosure document required under the 1934 securities law.
The company has not declared its intentions, but Google is the most anticipated public offering since the dot-com bubble burst four years ago.
People speculate. People dream. And if the numbers are to be believed, people will drool. The current prediction is that Google, if it decides to sell shares to investors this year, would probably end up with a market value of $20 billion to $25 billion by the end of its first day as a publicly traded company.
A $25 billion market value would instantly make Google worth more than Lockheed Martin, the big military contractor; Federal Express, the package delivery service; or Nike, the sports clothing maker.
As a great many people have learned the hard way in recent years, things don't always happen as the experts predict, especially when a company is involved in the high-risk realm of technology.
"It's bound to happen," Andy Bechtolsheim, who was the first person outside the company to invest in Google, said of the long-awaited public offering. Mr. Bechtolsheim, a founder of Sun Microsystems, said he owns a little more than 1 percent of Google. Assuming a huge opening day, the $200,000 he invested in Google in 1998 could be worth at least $300 million. Not everyone would fare as well. Many own a small stake in Google through an investment syndicate that included lots of Internet failures, and would stand to make only a modest profit on their total investment, if anything.
The list of those expected to profit handsomely if Google proceeds with an initial public offering certainly includes the usual suspects. Start with the company's two young founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who started Google as graduate students at Stanford and are known affectionately as "the boys" among Silicon Valley insiders.
Mr. Brin and Mr. Page, now in their early 30's, together own an estimated one-third to one half of Google, depending on which insider's number deserves credence.
"In a way, it doesn't make a difference whether the boys own a third of the company or half," said a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who spoke on the condition he not be identified because Google is a secretive company. "We're all living in a Google world now. You can safely say," he said, that "both of them will be worth in the many billions."
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital, the two venture capital firms that invested in Google in June 1999, just as Google was becoming a daily tool of the digital elite, each own 11 percent to 14 percent of the company, several Silicon Valley venture capitalists say.
The list of institutions that stand to make a small fortune from Google includes two of its potential rivals, America Online, now part of Ti
HERE is the link
Traditionally, the NYSE won't list a company with more than one class of stock. But they've softened that criterion in recent years.
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
News.com.com reports that you are wrong. To quote:
In an unusual provision for a technology company, Google will create two classes of shares with different voting rights, a move that aims to guarantee founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will maintain decision-making authority...
"In our opinion, outside pressures too often tempt companies to sacrifice long-term opportunities to meet quarterly market expectations. Sometimes this pressure has caused companies to manipulate financial results in order to 'make their quarter.' In Warren Buffett's words, 'We won't smooth quarterly or annual results: If earnings figures are lumpy when they reach headquarters, they will be lumpy when they reach you."
The founders have also fought to maintain their control over the company even as it hired Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt in 2000. According to the document, Page and Brin said that they will run the company as a "triumvirate."
You are better off organizing an Investment Club. $100-$200 is not really enough to start investing.
Java: the COBOL of the new millenium.
Did anyone else find it interesting that Google's Proposed Maximum Aggregate Offering Price is equivalent to e*(10^9)? ($2,718,281,828) I think this is Google's way of telling us geeks that everything is going to be 'ok'.
-- Kleptotherapy: Helping those who help themselves.
Here's the wsj article(for subscribers).
An interesting paragraph-
"According to the filing, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt made $ 250,000 in salarly and got a $301,556 bonus last year, plus other compensation of $2,894. Co-founders Mr. Brin, now president of technology and Mr. Page, now president of products, both got salaries of $150,000 and bonuses of 206,556.".
And you can compare the pay with other US companies. Other companies can learn from google here.
For those worried that Google will become a wall street pawn, here's what the founders are doing about it-
"The offering documents were filed with a lengthy letter, called the "Owner's Manual" for the company. In it, co-founder Larry Page said he and co-founder Sergey Brin have worried that the "standard structure of public ownership may jeopardize the independence and focused objectivity that have been most important in Google's past success and that we consider most fundamental for its future."
As a result, the founders "have designed a corporate structure that will protect Google's ability to innovate and retain its most distinctive characteristics."
Part of that will be a dual-class structure, in which the founders will hold a higher-vote class of stock that will allow them to control much of the company's fate.".
Bottom line? Once you go public, wall street makes you ride to its tunes. Preventing that at google will establish it not only as the intelligent company but a financially astute one too.
Side note-Berkshire hathaway is planning to soak up as many shares are available.
Any ideas what Google will do with the money it raises?
"If you had had a PubSub.com SEC Edgar subscription, you would have been one of the first to see this filing."
:) God bless our system lol.
Well the companies trying to make a buck on Google's name already begins
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Don't be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served--as shareholders and in all other ways--by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.
If Google were a woman, I would ask her to marry me.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
What will they think of next?
http://google-ipo.com/
That site has been around for a while, a unofficial google ipo watch.
Useful.
This will stop your worries
In an unusual provision for a technology company, Google will create two classes of shares with different voting rights, a move that aims to guarantee founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will maintain decision-making authority. Such structures have proven beneficial in media companies, such as The New York Times, the filing states.
So this mean Larry and Sergey will still drive Google and everyone knows how they work. I don't think they will just react how wall street wants them to react.
I mean, come on, didn't anyone other than MSN have a description of Dutch Auction IPOs?
Where is the project going to get the thousands of systems needed to make a cluster which could minimally compare to the one google uses?
Searching is not just a matter of good algorithms. There is power needed to push it all around the insulting amount of information out there.
__
Sig: Marine Stock Photos
NASDAQ is already in a declining pattern, breaking most of its moving averages in a downward position. Google will have the privilege of IPO'ing into a general market selloff.
I myself have been wondering what their ticker might be too. GOO seems like a good call, as GOOG just seems kinda stupid, except for the fact it's a one of those words, can't think of the name... palandrome or whatever. Sadly, G is already taken by Gillette. Even GG, GGG, and GGGG are taken. Even if they wanted to go back to the roaring 90's, GCOM is taken too. Dang, forget domain name squatting, sounds like a good buisness in ticker squatting.
7) Profit !!!
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
Just FYI... I didn't see anyone post a link to Google's Press Release about their registration. Maybe I missed it, but there it is.
Let the evil begin!
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.
Microsoft will own the search market and yahoo and google will merge and form Yahoogle.
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?
See other posts... Google's IPO is going to be Dutch Auction style, not "buddies of the investment bank" style. This will be done on the internet, and anyone can particpate.
More details are here
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
First off, let's get something straight. Buying common stock on the open market is not investing. It's speculating. The investing occurred when money was given directly to the company for use in its operations by the VC's and by the Syndicates that bought the common stock and sold it into the open market. Those were investors. They drove the company and created its stable value. You and I buy a tiny chit representing something we have no effective control over which will probably never pay off in hard compensation but may, if we're very lucky, pay a few shekels in dividends and get traded in for the speculative paper of some company that wants to actually own this one.
On the other hand, get a load of the Summary Consolidated Financial Data. Not only is Google booming, it never even skipped a stitch through the "downturn". This is the strongest book I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of these things (because I'm a savvy speculator, see).
So, what's going to happen? I'll tell you: you'll never see the stock hit the street.
Prior art: BajaFresh Mexican Cantina filed for an IPO a couple of years ago. We all love BFMC, and I'd even called their headquarters a couple of years before begging them to take my money and give me a piece of the action. Between the time they filed with the SEC and the putative issue date, they were bought lock, stock, and tortillas by Wendy's.
That's how things work. If the company is profitable enough, it's foolish to allow it to be publicly traded. Better to own it privately and pocket the profits in your personal account, or to own it as a subsidiary and use its profitability to cover for your flagging businesses.
So y'all can forget about buying that one share of everyone's favorite search engine and pinning it to your cork-board. This will be inhaled by IBM or Sun or someone with a bottom line to shore up.
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"
Google also filed a form 10-12G today. This should be read in concert with the S-1.
bob wyman
CTO, PubSub Concepts, Inc.
http://pubsub.com
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I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
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 )
Look at their balance sheet, p.3, on the SEC link in the article.
Take the 2003 column, add up the Costs and Expenses section, minus the Cost of Revenues, then divide by the number of employees (1907).
This gives $261k per employee.
If you want proof that I added the correct numbers, look at the filing, p.42-46, and you'll see that those items are primarily the employee salaries and other employee costs. There are other non-employee costs in the Sales and marketing section, such as advertising and promotional expenditures, but they are not listed as primary items. A portion of the Cost of Revenues could be arguably included as well, but I wasn't sure of the split between the cost of their data centers, and the labor associated with their operation. Therefore, I did not include them. The non-inclusion of the labor costs here would help offset the inclusion of the non-primary items in the Sales and marketing category above.
You can also do the same thing for the first quarter of 2004 (see balance sheet), extrapolating to $380k per employee for the year. Note that on p.39, the headcount is 1907 as of March 31, 2004.
Therefore, $380,000 per employee is a more accurate figure.
Google is not likely the type of company where clerical and data-entry people outnumber the engineers / computer scientists.
Oh yeah, add in the full Cost of Revenues number and you'll get the "total cost of business" you were talking about.
Dave
FPGA, Wireless, ASIC, Verilog, VHDL, HW, 10yr exp, Team Lead, Ottawa (More? Email above. slashdotusername=dgmartin98 )