Banker who helped take Google public wants to do the same for Facebook
Here's a worthy contrarian to pop the bubble in Facebook bears. In 2003, former Wall Street analyst Lise Buyer wrote Google CEO Eric Schmidt and founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin a note reading: “I don’t know if you’ll ever want to go public but I bet that, having been on the other side of the table, I could be helpful to you if so.” Now, four years after Schmidt, Page and Brin said yes and Buyer helped take Google public in 2004, she's got the same message for Facebook. "To be candid," Buyer told Private Equity HUB, "I’d love to work with them." She said why:
I think it’ll be fascinating because like Google, they like to do things their own way. And that’s been tremendously successful so far. I think that clearly Facebook’s business model needs to be well-proven before anything happens, and that they’ve been smart to put off the process until they put all the pieces into place. Also, though it’s terrific to have Microsoft as an investor, Facebook’s valuation may or may not turn out to be right valuation for public equity investors. But I do think that what they’ve built is tremendous and enduring and that they’ll find a way to turn theirs into a steadily growing, highly profitable business.