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"8-figure revenue" Which Facebook has. So why arent they public? Obviously not the monetary cost of SOX. It could be one of the toher parts of SOX (such as the

"8-figure revenue" Which Facebook has. So why arent they public? Obviously not the monetary cost of SOX. It could be one of the toher parts of SOX (such as the regulations on public company execs) but I find it hard to believe the cost of the accounting department is the reason Facebook isn't public. There are thousands of companies smaller than Facebook being traded every day and they're not going backrupt because of the accounting costs. Even without SOX, there were a lot of reasons to remain private. On the margins some companies remain private because of SOX costs. (If SOX is preventing useless companies with 0 revenue from going public I see that as a feature and not a bug). But on the scale of Facebook, the costs are not important. So there are other reasons driving this, not SOX.

tptacek 16y ago
You're right; Facebook easily can go public. I think the subtext is, had SOX not happened, it's very likely they would already have gone public. What I'm suggesting happened was, SOX took the IPO mechanism, which was a common and easy path to liquidity for VC, and made it a much bigger deal --- not just because of the regulatory burden that it imposes, but also because it washed out many hundreds of companies that might have gone public instead of taking a C round. Being one of a small number of standard bearers for tech's return to the public markets is a different thing than being one of the best of hundreds of tech companies at varying stages of growth on the market.