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Comment by Swannie | Hacker News Reader

One reason why I'm not buying Facebook:

I don't have $2mil lying around.

Another one;

Why is Mark so reticent to IPO? Because he loses control? Or because that means making the numbers public, and people will see just where the money is going. Either way, if the CEO doesn't want to go public and may be forced to, that is not good.

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Bill Gates was another person who didn't want to do an IPO. He almost cancelled it a number of times during the process as he felt it would just be a distraction to actually getting real business done. Mark Zuckerberg could have similar concerns.

I didn't know that. It certainly sounds reasonable, but is that what happened at Microsoft, after their IPO?

He's said (maybe at Davos?) that the main reason is because Facebook has a lot of stuff they want to launch that is high risk and might not be acceptable to see come from a public company. (For example, could you imagine what would have happened the stock when Beacon came out?)

Well if he wants to pull more stunts like Beacon, being a public company may well be the best thing for Facebook.

He's only ever really had to answer to himself, right? From what I know of him, he probably likes that a lot more than having to answer to a bunch of shareholders.

Yeah, well, I for one hope they do have to publicise results, but they do NOT go for an IPO any time soon.

One of the downsides of going public is that the customer base shifts---no longer are your customers the ones that buy/use your product, but your customers are the ones that buy your stock. And because of the legal requirement of increasing shareholder value, the company may be forced into short term profitability (make the numbers next quarter) instead of longer term long range profitability or stability.

It may simply be that he's heard from others who do run public companies how much it sucks. It dramatically changes how you run things, and you wouldn't want to be CEO of a public company. He knows that much at least.

There may be other reasons as you say, certainly having to deal with the scrutiny would not be fun, no matter how above board you may be (or likely not).

Not good for whom? Potential investors or Facebook (the company)?

In any case, I think it will be quite interesting to see just how much revenue facebook is generating from it's various sources.

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