Yes. When a company is 'operationally cash flow positive' which is to say they make enough money that not only does their bank account balance increase each quarter, but also their future spending to refresh their equipment and offices etc would not cause their cash balance to go below its current point. That company will have the opportunity to 'exit' (sell themselves to another company) or IPO.
To quote the former CFO of Blekko, "Every month we have a number of dollars in the bank, that number is bigger than last month, 'Bueno', its smaller than last month 'No Bueno.'"
Easy and quantifiable.
Also, if the company is losing money, and each month the bank balance goes down, divide the rate of loss by the balance, at the zero intercept the company will 'exit'.
Also easy and quantifiable.
Between those two 'easy' versions, lays the challenge. But for your question which included the caveat "... in the near future" only the easy ones apply.
True and true, but I'm not sure what you were trying to say. Blekko never did discover the secret to competing with the #1 and #2 search engine companies spending over $5B a year to buy search traffic :-). However IBM found great value in a technology that could effectively crawl and index billions of pages, that is, remarkably, still a hard problem even today.
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and six pence, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."
Comments
Yes. When a company is 'operationally cash flow positive' which is to say they make enough money that not only does their bank account balance increase each quarter, but also their future spending to refresh their equipment and offices etc would not cause their cash balance to go below its current point. That company will have the opportunity to 'exit' (sell themselves to another company) or IPO.
To quote the former CFO of Blekko, "Every month we have a number of dollars in the bank, that number is bigger than last month, 'Bueno', its smaller than last month 'No Bueno.'"
Easy and quantifiable.
Also, if the company is losing money, and each month the bank balance goes down, divide the rate of loss by the balance, at the zero intercept the company will 'exit'.
Also easy and quantifiable.
Between those two 'easy' versions, lays the challenge. But for your question which included the caveat "... in the near future" only the easy ones apply.
Blekko exited by selling to IBM. That was a pure technology buy; the public search engine was killed.
True and true, but I'm not sure what you were trying to say. Blekko never did discover the secret to competing with the #1 and #2 search engine companies spending over $5B a year to buy search traffic :-). However IBM found great value in a technology that could effectively crawl and index billions of pages, that is, remarkably, still a hard problem even today.
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and six pence, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."