History of Google - Financing and Initial Public Offering

Financing and Initial Public Offering

The first funding for Google as a company was secured on August 1998 in the form of a $100,000USD contribution from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, given to a corporation which did not yet exist.

On June 7, 1999, a round of equity funding totalling $25 million was announced; the major investors being rival venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.

While Google still needed a lot of funding for their further expansion, Brin and Page were hesitant to take the company public even though that would basically solve most of their financial issues. They were not ready to give up their control over Google. After borrowing the $25 million venture capital money from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital, Sequoia forced Brin and Page to hire a CEO or else they would take back that borrowed $12.5 million. Finally, Brin and Page gave in and hired Eric Schmidt as Google’s first CEO in March 2001 and the company went public three years later.

In October 2003, while discussing a possible initial public offering of shares (IPO), Microsoft approached the company about a possible partnership or merger. However, no such deal ever materialized. In January 2004, Google announced the hiring of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group to arrange an IPO. The IPO was projected to raise as much as $4 billion.

On April 29, 2004, Google made an S-1 form SEC filing for an IPO to raise as much as $2,718,281,828. This alludes to Google's corporate culture with a touch of mathematical humor as e ≈ 2.718281828. April 29 was also the 120th day of 2004, and according to section 12(g) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, "a company must file financial and other information with the SEC 120 days after the close of the year in which the company reaches $10 million in assets and/or 500 shareholders, including people with stock options." Google has stated in its annual filing for 2004 that every one of its 3,021 employees "except temporary employees and contractors, are also equity holders, with significant collective employee ownership", so Google would have needed to make its financial information public by filing them with the SEC regardless of whether or not they intended to make a public offering. As Google stated in the filing, their "growth has reduced some of the advantages of private ownership. By law, certain private companies must report as if they were public companies. The deadline imposed by this requirement accelerated our decision." The SEC filing revealed that Google turned a profit every year since 2001 and earned a profit of $105.6 million on revenues of $961.8 million during 2003.

In May 2004, Google officially cut Goldman Sachs from the IPO, leaving Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston as the joint underwriters. They chose the unconventional way of allocating the initial offering through an auction (specifically, a "Dutch auction"), so that "anyone" would be able to participate in the offering. The smallest required account balances at most authorized online brokers that are allowed to participate in an IPO, however, are around $100,000. In the run-up to the IPO the company was forced to slash the price and size of the offering, but the process did not run into any technical difficulties or result in any significant legal challenges. The initial offering of shares was sold for $85 each. The public valued it at $100.34 at the close of the first day of trading, which saw 22,351,900 shares change hands.

Google's initial public offering took place on August 25, 2004. A total of 19,605,052 shares were offered at a price of $85 per share. Of that, 14,142,135 (another mathematical reference as √2 ≈ 1.4142135) were floated by Google and 5,462,917 by selling stockholders. The sale raised US$1.67 billion, and gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion. Many of Google's employees became instant paper millionaires. Yahoo!, a competitor of Google, also benefited from the IPO because it owns 2.7 million shares of Google.

The company is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbol GOOG.