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Three Headwinds for Facebook's IPO

Harvard Business Review

When I logged into the site for the first time in the spring of 2004, I was prepared to hate the service. And despite all of Facebook's user support, investors should be skeptical of the company's pricey IPO. There is a lot of emotion behind the Facebook IPO. It was just weeks until Zuckerberg's addictive platform won me over.

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Should Everyone Be Allowed to Invest in Private Tech Companies?

Harvard Business Review

In addition, given their quest for organization leanness, digital startups seek investors who have the expertise to help outsource their noncore business functions, such as production, distribution, marketing, and payroll processing. Gone is the heyday of the 1990s when firms with simply an idea and little or no revenues could do an IPO.

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The Dell Deal Explained: What a Successful Turnaround Looks Like

Harvard Business Review

And last year, he decided that the answer was to take the company private, to escape the hectoring of the public market. In 2004, Michael Dell left the company, replaced by Kevin Rollins, a former Bain consultant who joined the company in 1996. For more background on the potential deal, click here.) Dell returned as CEO in 2007.

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An Insider’s Account of the Yahoo-Alibaba Deal

Harvard Business Review

At the time, though, we were just in search of a new approach to building a sustainable business in that critical but often difficult market. In fact, you could say (and many did) that our previous attempts had failed, in that we hadn’t established a sustained market position. Things hadn’t gone well up until that point.

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What Apple Should Do with Its Massive Piles of Money

Harvard Business Review

In this letter, I’d like to explain more fully why I view the $51 billion already spent by Apple on open market (including accelerated) share repurchases under your leadership as a major misallocation of resources for both the company and the U.S. Rather, they trade in outstanding shares in the hope that their market price will increase.