Free Republic

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - As Google Inc. nears the end of its first quarter as a public company, industry watchers say one of its emerging challenges is how to keep soon-to-be wealthy workers from cashing out and moving on. "The loss of key employees is a real risk for a technology company after it goes public," said Eric Jackson, an early PayPal executive who left after the online payment company's IPO and acquisition by eBay Inc. Based on Google's share price of around $130, Salary.com senior vice president Bill Coleman estimated that around 60 percent of the 1,900 Google employees...

Google said on Monday it would list its shares on the Nasdaq stock market, ending months of speculation over whether the world's most used internet search engine would pick Nasdaq or its larger rival, the New York Stock Exchange. The announcement, made in a regulatory filing, moves Google one step closer to completing its initial public offering. The company would like to finish the sale by the end of this month, according to people familiar with its plans. Google announced plans for the sale, which could raise at least $2.7bn (?2.2bn), in April. At that time, the company said it...

NEW YORK – With all the anti-establishment, power-to-the-people refrains sounded in its IPO manifesto, it's curious that Google Inc. chose to reward the most notorious investment bank of the IPO boom to spearhead the initial public offering. Although Credit Suisse First Boston presumably cleansed its reputation two years ago with a $100 million settlement of federal charges, Monday's conviction of the firm's former star banker was a perfectly timed reminder of the greedy past that shadows one of Google's new Wall Street pals. It's not that the search engine company was obligated to jeopardize its chances of a big IPO...

After a long dry spell, the venture capital industry is hoping an upcoming initial public offering by Web search giant Google will help start a new flow of cash to young companies. But despite a pick-up in venture financing in the first quarter, the money now being raised bringing new companies public is just a light rain compared to the downpour of cash that flooded the market at peak of the tech boom in 2000. Figures released Monday show that venture-backed companies took in $5 billion in investments in the first quarter, a healthy gain from the $4 billion collected...