Out of curiosity, what would this list have looked like before Sarbanes-Oxley? Everyone always says about how that made it more difficult to go public.
Ryan runs icontact.com -- I've heard they've been interested in going public for a while. It is interesting to hear what Ryan had to say about the process.
Perhaps their biggest competitor, Constant Contact, went public last year.
Funny seeing the comment from Dave Sifry. We were more or less weeks/months away from an IPO at Linuxcare, hot on the heels of Redhat and VA Linux... then, poof.
I think he meant the ability to have higher valuation, which often is cited as a multiple of revenue, EBIDTA, etc. For instance, a publicly traded company will tend to have a higher valuation than a private one b/c it is more liquid and stockholders can cash out on some stock exchange at any time.
You hit the nail on the head. When valuing a privately held company, an investor will almost always apply a discount for lack of marketability because unlike 100 shares of stock in say IBM, for example, an investor doesn't have an easily available market to quickly sell their shares in a private company.
Because of the greater investor/regulator financial and legal scrutiny, better access to cheap capital, and tighter regulation over who can/cannot be a director * , your company has a greater probability of long term survival. This makes it more likely that people will value your company at a greater multiple of annual earnings.
