I'm not saying a dutch auction is necessarily a worse option. Indeed it might theoretically be the best. But they spent a vast amount of money setting it up, wi

I'm not saying a dutch auction is necessarily a worse option. Indeed it might theoretically be the best. But they spent a vast amount of money setting it up, with all the extra legal fees and transactional costs, so let's not focus entirely on the money left on the table by the strategic error to a) pick a theoretical, rather than tested, procedure that was b) seemingly, poorly executed and c) if it yielded any lessons at all, for which there is no evidence, Schmidt refuses to share. On a pedantic point, if my understanding is correct, google made (14m * 85) about 1.2 bil on the IPO, not 1.67 - the rest being sold by other stockholders (who, incidentally, 'lost' $136.5 mil due to the pop, and made $464m, minus fees for being involved in the IPO - not insignificant) That means that Google made 1.2 bil, but had they 'got it right' (very difficult, of course, as other commenters point out, 14% pop is usual on IPOs) they would have made $1.55 bil. You can make it seem small compared to their market cap, but the headline is: he's proud at a messy, protracted transaction, possibly the most important in Google's history, that netted them $353m more than their 1.2 bil haul. That's 20-25% on the table, well in excess of the 14% bandied about in this thread. And all that says nothing about the overarching questions of 'Why IPO, why then?' and 'what actually went wrong?'