When start-ups go public

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"I am a great believer in hiring straight out of college where possible. We have a programme to do that in our professional services division."

"At the same time, we have to have the right people in the right places. After all, we sell to C-level board members, so we have to also hire experienced sales staff and people who have been in business themselves, as well as developing staff from within. As we focus more on selling our product to bigger businesses, so we will need staff who cal sell to that audience."

As for the floatation, which took place just a week before Christmas, Nelson admitted that going in to the final stages, even he was concerned that a floatation so close to Christmas might not maximise interest in the sale.

"We had some concerns about a Q4 07 IPO as we got closer to it, particularly given the proximity to the holiday season. In hindsight, it turned out to be better than having the IPO in Q1 08."

The floatation of NetSuite was made more curious by the company's decision to use an auction process to set the price and sell the shares, very similar to the sale process used by Google for its floatation.

"The auction was a flawless process. Our auction was slightly different to Google as we only took bids online, while Google also took traditional broker bids."

"Ultimately the market set the price for the IPO through demand for the stock," he added.

As well as garnering interest from both investors and the media in its floatation plans, the auction served an additional purpose, that of attracting a specific type of investor while discouraging the more opportunist short term share buyer.

"We wanted long-term shareholders, and holding an auction rather than a normal floatation share sale was unlikely to attract many short-term investors."

"Going forward I think more companies will use this method for selling share," said Nelson.

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