There was a week in 1986 that was pretty exciting because that was the week we
moved into the campus. Here is Jon with his “Move” T-shirt and I guess this is me in
my new office with my “Move” T-shirt. But that same week we moved in, we went
public as a company, this is our offering prospectus. And that was also the week of
Microsoft's first CD-ROM Conference where we were pushing the idea of
multimedia back in 1986 that didn't really catch on, you could say, until 1994 so
before it was in the mainstream. But this kind of shows you the pace of activity at
that time. We felt fine to have all those things happen all at once. And I know that
next Monday I flew down to Australia to be part of a big software show down there.
DKA: Let's talk a little about going public and whether that was something that
everybody accepted that you needed to do, whether it was a controversial issue, and
what difference it made.
BG: Well, Microsoft had started giving out stock options to people as early as
1981. So we were sharing in the success we thought we'd have. As we did that, they
had about a five year vesting period. And so as some people were starting to vest on
quite a bit of their stock, there was the question of how would they get liquidity.
Now you could just let it be traded privately, but then the price would fluctuate a lot
because the supply would be so short. And I was quite reluctant to go public because
of the overhead. We had been able to track our stock price internally up in a very
linear way. And with the market sort of maybe over-anticipating the future, or getting
paranoid -- you know the stock would be very volatile. But I was convinced that it
made since. And as long as we were going to do it, it was an opportunity to really
expose the company broadly. Talk about our vision where we had done well, where
we were taking the industry. And it did become something that was covered very,
very broadly by a lot of people. And it was extremely successful. The stock took off
after this offering at $21.00 and it just zoomed up from there for many, many years.
DKA: There was no regret about going public?
BG: Going public is not without its complexities in terms of dealing with analysts
and all the reports. It is a little convoluted about when can you keep things secret
versus having to go out and talk about those things. So, it is not totally simple. But
the benefit of having the stock be very liquid for everyone was very positive. We
didn't use any of the money that we raised. We just put that money in the bank and
it sat there with all of the money that we had earned, because we were very profitable
and had plenty of cash by this time. So our reason for going public was very different
than any other company that was going public.