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Comment by uberemployee | Hacker News Reader

Guys this is somewhat fake news. The question was what his thoughts were on IPO. He basically said it's up to the board, but 18 to 36 months seemed reasonable. It wasn't like he's actually planning on IPOing in 18 months, it was an off-the-cuff response and gave a ballpark figure. That's all, don't read too much into it he hasn't even officially started yet.

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The real news is this is precisely why TK was ousted. He was categorically opposed to taking Uber public, and that went against the wishes of big investors who want an IPO payday.

He wasn't opposed to taking Uber public, he wanted to delay IPO as long as possible because going public places restrictions on how the company is run. Dara said the same comment. But 18-36 months doesn't go against anything TK said.

Profitability is usually a good idea before you IPO.

Why do you need to raise money if you are profitable?

Employee & investor liquidity, who are the majority stockholders of these kinds of companies. And the value of a stock does far better when something is profitable vs not. Past history shows it's usually a bad idea to be a public company and be in the red for many quarters.

If you're profitable you can disburse dividends to all of the non public shareholders on a regular or irregular basis.

Going public is a really expensive way to do that with a profitable company (why spotify is trying to do it in an irregular way)

> Past history shows it's usually a bad idea to be a public company and be in the red for many quarters.

Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Marc Benioff would strongly disagree.

Under this reasoning if you're profitable, you may not want to go public. Now you have to worry about public perception and hostile outlets affecting a major asset.

Most shareholders don't like dividends because of the tax treatment compared to stock buybacks. It's still less liquid than a public market.

As far as those other examples, I don't know their full histories. From my memory amazon has had a break-even policy on purpose which investors are ok with. FB was profitable for about a year before IPO and its stock went to half of IPO for a year because people were worried about it's numbers until they got a lot of a money through mobile.

It was known previously that elements on the board wanted IPO, and this is something you'd have to get ultra clear before you'd be given the job. I hope.

So while the timeline can't be precise, I'm guessing this isn't floating a trial balloon, this is whats happening.

There are a lot of people waiting for their liquidity.

probably most want the IPO, including, and maybe especially, employees. Shares in a public company are much more liquid.

Love or hate Benchmark, they bet on them and now they want to cash out. An IPO might make their stake worth 2X so can't blame them for advancing their interests. If someone offered then an out at $100B valuation they'd sell, I'm sure.

Personally I think that as a public company they will be under more scrutiny and cannot do "startup" things...like breaking taxi laws around the world.

Not fake news, more like Clickbaity title.

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