Rob Glaser
“WHEN YOU GO PUBLIC, it's like being shot
out of a cannon. You go through this very intense two-week
period where you're traveling all over the world meeting
potential investors. One day we started in the morning in
Germany, did lunch in Paris, had an afternoon meeting in
Scotland, and then finished in London. We had a couple of days
in the U.S. where we crisscrossed four states in a day. And this
was seven years ago, before the technology boom had hit its full
fever.”
“One of our company's philosophies is that five
percent of profit will be donated to our foundation. You see,
while most companies do some charity, very few do as much as
five percent. And even fewer actually write it into their public
documents—but it was in our original business plan. The
bankers asked me, 'Look, do you really want to have this policy?
Because people who [observe] your company won't like this.”
“Only twice during the whole process of going public
did anybody even ask about it. One investor said, 'I read in
your prospectus that you're going to give five percent of your
profit to charity. Why don't you give that back to the investors
and let them give it to charity?' I said, 'We certainly
want to encourage investors to give to charity, but once it
leaves our hands, we don't control it. If we give the five
percent to charity ourselves, then we know it will serve a
positive purpose.' The other response I got was actually in the
other direction. In southern California, a guy associated with a
big investment company said, 'I'm on the board of the Boys and
Girls Club of Greater Los Angeles, and I'm going to really study
your business plan. If it's a close call whether to invest in
your company or not, the fact that you are making this
commitment to charity will definitely weigh favorably in my
decision, because I think it's wonderful.”
“My experience with this has been purely positive. It's
one of the things about the company that I'm most proud of.
Anybody who tells you that you can't do this is just wrong. And
you don't have to have a product that you're marketing as a
socially responsible product to run a company this way.
Sometimes doing the right thing is its own reward.”