[smileysteve]

If you're profitable you can disburse dividends to all of the non public shareholders on a regular or irregular basis.

Going public is a really expensive way to do that with a profitable company (why spotify is trying to do it in an irregular way)

> Past history shows it's usually a bad idea to be a public company and be in the red for many quarters.

Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Marc Benioff would strongly disagree.

Under this reasoning if you're profitable, you may not want to go public. Now you have to worry about public perception and hostile outlets affecting a major asset.

[mahyarm]

Most shareholders don't like dividends because of the tax treatment compared to stock buybacks. It's still less liquid than a public market.

As far as those other examples, I don't know their full histories. From my memory amazon has had a break-even policy on purpose which investors are ok with. FB was profitable for about a year before IPO and its stock went to half of IPO for a year because people were worried about it's numbers until they got a lot of a money through mobile.