Book on Google, $18B valuation on IPO?
Tony Perkins, founder of Red Herring and the new AlwaysOn Network (kind of like a Red Herring on blogs), who co-wrote the book, The Internet Bubble, announced today that he's writing a book on Google, ideally before the company goes public for an expected valuation of $18B (which is why they supposedly turned down a $10B offer from Microsoft recently), according to this AlwaysOn post (registration required):
It will also be fun to examine the forces behind Google’s IPO. Did you know that Andy Bechtolsheim (Sun Microsystems co-founder) gave the Google boys a $100,000 investment before they even named the company? Just think how much money he is going to make on the deal. Did you know that the company’s two primary investors, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital, still own 9% of the company? Each. It doesn’t take a person smart enough to work at Google to do the math on how much these stakes are going to be worth after an $18 billion IPO.
Perkins especially believes he's the right person to write this book because of the blogging phenomenon that has brought thousands to the AlwaysOn Network:
As the folks who have been following AlwaysOn know, we believe that our competitive advantage is you. While John Markoff of the New York Times and David Kirkpatrick of Fortune may have bigger Rolodexes, and while they may often have better access to sources, we have thousands of members we can turn to get the real inside track. And that’s who I’m counting on.