told Pete Muller and Robert Leib that they wanted to wait until further software development was complete. When that wore thin with the two board members, they had said they were waiting for the decimation of Homeplace to be complete, since that would add value to Fishbowl shares. But now, both within and outside Fishbowl, everyone assumed that Andrei had been waiting for the launch of the palotl program, and with that complete, the sale of Fishbowl stock through an IPO was only a matter of time.
Robert Leib, who knew as much as anyone about timing an IPO, argued that the time was ripe. Chris said that if Bob believed it was time to float, it probably was. Controversy over Farming 2.0 had died down, Leib pointed out, but it was still new enough to be exciting, and experienced analysts would realize that future revenue streams from the new program would be colossal. The buzz around it would lift the offering into the realm of an iconic, perhaps unprecedented internet float. The market for tech stocks, he also felt, was reaching one of its periodic peaks. If an IPO of the magnitude of Fishbowl’s was going to achieve its full price, there had to be plenty of cash looking for an investment home. Time it wrong and that cash would be locked up elsewhere, with the result that the IPO would come in under-priced. The market was perfect, awash with cash. Wait another year or two and that might change.
Andrei respected Leib’s sense for the market. But Bob Leib, after all, was an investor, with an interest in extracting the maximum return on his stake. Andrei had other considerations. He talked to another couple of tech CEOs he had got to know and they didn’t dispute Leib’s assessment, but they did advise Andrei to think carefully about whether he wanted to lead a public company. They had gone the IPO route and while they now each held shares worth $1 billion-plus, they emphasized the impact it would have on the way he ran Fishbowl. The company, and Andrei himself, would be under microscopic scrutiny day in, day out. And whereas now he could simply shrug his shoulders and ignore such scrutiny, he wouldn’t have that luxury once Fishbowl was listed on an exchange. There would be a legal minimum of information that he would be obliged to provide and that minimum was a lot more than Fishbowl was accustomed to giving out. He would have legal duties towards his shareholders. If anyone told him it made no difference to be publicly listed, they said, they either had no experience of it or they had an agenda of their own.
Their words weighed heavily with Andrei, as heavily as Leib’s recommendation in favour of an IPO. If Andrei did float the company, he would realize at least a billion of the value of his shares as a cash dividend on the day of the IPO, with many billions more in the value of the stock that he held. But he didn’t need those billions of dollars. He still lived with Sandy in the condo off University and had only a couple more pieces of furniture than the day he’d moved in. The car he drove was five years old. Having that kind of money in the bank would just complicate his life. Neither did he need the thrill – or the burden, as he envisaged it – of turning up in richest-people-on-the-planet lists. What he did value was his freedom to run Fishbowl the way he chose, and steer it towards the vision he had for all of the things that it could do in the world – a vision that had expanded dramatically with the creation of the palotl program and the non-commercial uses to which it could be put once it was further developed.
He called Kevin and Ben to ask each of them what they thought. They both had large stakes in the business and, although they didn’t have seats on the board, he thought they had a right to be heard. Even without the IPO, both of them had reaped rewards from Fishbowl ownership and were now wealthy men. Fishbowl was awash with cash and Andrei had arranged multi-million dividend payouts in the last couple of years, largely to ensure that they both had something to show for their early years at the company, since he himself had no need for the even bigger dividends that washed up in