more cash with higher stock price and opening of a battened-down hatch, there is more of a ‘let’s get back to work, let’s get goin’ and do some deals attitude,” Fletcher says. He offered this advice to the startup CEOs in the audience:
—Build your company for an IPO, but expect it to be a sale. “As I tell people,” Fletcher says, “We need to build this business like we’re going to own it forever—because if we don’t, we will.”
—Don’t be seduced into taking your company public too early. It can create problems in terms of limited trading liquidity, limited research and trading sponsorship, higher costs, and a valuation penalty.
—The best companies are bought, not sold. By this, Fletcher says he means, “You want somebody to come to you to buy your company.” To accomplish that, he says it’s important to form business development relationships with larger corporate partners, so your company comes to mind when big companies start shopping for acquisitions.
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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