How to take private company public?

An easy read intended for the general public is "Own Your Own Corporation" by Garrett Sutton. Chapters such as :"Organizational Steps for Formaing a Corporation, Limited Liability Company and Limited Partnership", "The Importance of Corporate Formalities" and "Raising Money" should help. "Guide to Investing" by Robert Kiyosaki can put this information in context. Read the following chapters: "The Accredited Investor", "The Qualified Investor" and "The Inside Investor". The idea is to sell and own IPO shares from the inside (at near zero owner cost) rather than buy them on the outside. Your local library probably has these.

For your paper you will want to quote "Harvard Business Review", Fortune 500 CEOs and nobel prize winning economists. The more incomprehensible the advice, the more sophisticated, advanced and incredibly intelligent it seems. Use lots of jargon and advanced mathematics.

Please don't give me your opinion of these books unless you have actually read them recently.

Good Luck on your paper.

Sam, as I'm sure you know there are a lot of pieces to this. Maybe approach it by pretending you have a company that's up and running, and you want to do an IPO...what do you do? In a nutshell, you need to create stock, set a price for it, and find a way to distribute it to investors who are willing to fork over cash. The risks are that you get a lousy price, don't raise enough cash for your needs, and/or give up too much ownership. The principal rewards are obtaining cash for the business, providing a mechanism (the stock market) for easy & cheap liquidation of ownership stakes for founders and investors, and providing currency (stock) that can be used for compensation of employees and executives. Plus it pays a lot of lawyers & bankers really well, and oils the gears of retail brokerage firms, let's not forget that piece.

So just add to that and you have your paper! =)

My suggestion is to take a stroll over to a law library and spend a few hours with a legal practice guide on Securities Law, and a corporate-finance text book. This will give you an idea of the questions raised and legal requirements for the IPO process (Securities Act of '33, "blue-sky" laws, etc). Securities are heavily regulated and there's a web of federal and state laws that need to be complied with. If you understand the legal side of it much of the rest falls into place.

As part of that process a lot of financial questions are raised and that's the role of the investment bank(ers). The issue of how to value a company, determine the right capital structure, and how much cash to raise. Again, hit the library, there are literally hundreds of books on this process. On the internet I can't imagine you'll find enough to write a grad-level paper.

I think fewer people would buy IPO stocks if they learned more about this process. The valuation step, in particular, has so much slop in it, and the process is so fraught with "agency problems," that IPOs deserve a good bit of distrust, from the perspective of the individual investor.

-Tad