Name: KKR co-CEO: The right time to go public
Uploaded: 2015-07-14
Duration: 2 min 8 s
Description: Henry Kravis says companies should IPO only when they need capital.

[ MUSIC ] Do you think that the concerns of privately held tech CEOs about going public, are those legitimate concerns or do you think those are jitters folks should just get over? Look, I'm not gonna tell any company they should go public. If they have a reason to go public, and they need to raise capital and it's a way for them to raise capital, or they want the stock to use to be able to buy Other companies. If you've got a good company you can continue in the environment we're in. You can raise a lot of money as all of you know. So you don't have to go public. I would tell most companies wait until you have to go public, because then you don't have the scrutiny of the quarter to quarter earnings. I think the worst thing to happen to corporate America are quarterly earnings. Because you end up making a lot of very short- term decisions, when in reality you should be making long term decisions. Question I like to ask, and this is without doing any due diligence on them, but I think theres 100 or so of these so- called unicorn companies. These billion dollar plus, privately held tech companies. If you were to put them in a bucket, at their current prices, or where they were last round. Would you personally invest in it? As weird index. Would you buy it? Well, you know, what's really hard. I can't tell you, and I don't think anybody can tell you, who the winners and the losers will be in each industry. What strikes me, though, as I look at these and I say well what you're pricing these on, you're pricing them in large part on that one or two or three of these will be winners. I don't buy the fact that there necessarily will be three winners at the prices that you're valuing the companies. There'll be one winner. Who knows what it is? So let's assume you've got something at $ 1 billion today. No cash flow from it, really. A concept. It's a great concept. It can scale. But you've got three of these people. There's probably more downside than there is upside there, but one of them will probably be a winner, because the industries in which most of them operating in are scalable industries.

KKR co-CEO: The right time to go public

Henry Kravis says companies should IPO only when they need capital.