Dan Adamo
4-01-08
Scribe Notes
Discussion Leader: Danny Chapters 9 and 10
Google Should Go Public
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Revenue by 2003 was almost 1 billion dollars
In 2003 believed that it the initial public offering would be $16 million
o Rivaled other big companies
Hesitant about going public
Violated an SEC (Securities and Exchange Committee) rule which required
companies which gave more than 1000 stock options to their employees to go
public
On April 29, 2004, Google files its formal public offering document
Google Goes Public
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Handled differently from most companies that go public
o Used a public auction to set the price of its stock—unique because most
companies use an investment bank
o Google did not want to go public (other companies can buy shares and
other people can have say in the company)
o Had to go public because they gave shares to more than 1,000 employees
Other thing that they did different
o Investment bank typically begins to sell the shares at initial low prices
o When company goes public the shares rise, and the people that bought the
initial stocks make a lot of money
o Instead, Google set the initial price through a public auction to let the
public determine the initial price
 The price doesn’t jump too much
Through “dual class” shareholding structure, Brin and Page contained more
control over the company
Problems Going Public
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Experienced a few problems going public
o Reprimanded by the SEC for selling shares to the employees without
registering them
o Sarbanes-Oxley Act
o Google was trying to do their IPO at a time when all of these laws were
becoming very strict
 Auditing is very hard at Google because the money was coming by
the penny—through CPC.
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Not easy to know where the money is coming from and
where the money is going
August 18, 2004 Google officially goes public with shares going at 85$ a share
By November the same year the shares went up to 200$
Continued to go up—reached almost $700, now it is dipping
Chapter 10—Google Today, Google Tomorrow
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Google was essentially becoming a new company because after going public they
had to overview their company
o Organized into core groups by their functions- Ex. Core-search,
advertising, and products known as “20 percent” and “10 percent”
 Ex. Of 20% projects are G-mail and Google News
 4 days a week you work on what they tell you, and one day
a week you get to work on a project (such as G-mail and
Google News)
o A lot of the cool things we see from Google started
from these 20 and 10 percent concept.
o If they didn’t have the 20 percent stuff people
would have had these ideas and left to start their
own thing
In 2004 dropped Top 100 list, and broke it up into the different segments
o Top 100 list, ranked employee’s projects
o Encourage innovation
o Became a little hard to manage as the company grew
Differences between Yahoo! And Google
In 2001, Yahoo was hurt by the market and almost went out of business. Had to lay
off hundreds of workers. Stock dropped from 500 to 10
- The main difference between Google and Yahoo is Yahoo is more aggressive in
commercializing on its website
- Google tries to solve things by strictly using technology; while Yahoo approaches
problems with humans ideas are needed.