Ridesharing company Uber does not plan to go public anytime soon, as most of the company’s leaders say that they want to experience more growth before making an IPO.
The news came as the company’s top executives were speaking at a technology conference in Laguna Beach, CA. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said, “Give us a few years, give us a little time and when the time is right, something like that will happen.”
Several investors have put money into the company, and its current valuation is estimated to be more than $50 billion. Kalanick is confident that he can lead Uber to an even greater financial future.
Uber is still only a five year old company. While a company can obviously go public at any point in time, Kalanick feels that waiting until the time is perfect is the correct move.
However, one board member of Uber, Bill Gurley, possibly disagrees with the decision to not go public.
Before Kalanick spoke, Gurley had offered his own thoughts on an IPO. He said that making an IPO was a major priority for startup companies like Uber.
“We’ve got to go back to looking at the IPO as the objective,” he said.
However, Gurley stopped short of specifically saying that Uber should make an IPO. That being said, he has long been an advocate for Silicon Valley startups to make IPOs as soon as possible. Kalanick sincerely stated that he valued Gurley’s opinion.
Kalanick said, “When it comes to Bill Gurley, I actually respect a lot of his perspective. It doesn’t mean in the board meetings we agree on everything, but that’s okay. That’s how you get to the right perspective. We’re just not ready for that kind of event.”
Gurley later relented in an email that Uber is very young to make an IPO.
Meanwhile, investors are putting extremely large sums of money into American startup companies. Last year, venture capitalists invested $48.3 billion into such companies. This is the most amount of money since investors put $105 billion into startups in 2000. In 2009, only $20.4 billion was invested into startup companies.
When Uber does eventually make its IPO, you can be sure that both the public and market analysts will follow the event extremely closely, much like they did with Facebook in 2012.
However, it could be a few years until Uber executives feel that the company is ready.
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