[legion]

I was a Finance major in college. In studying public companies, I saw a lot of short-sighted decision making. I often saw companies do things like layoff too much staff or shut down profitable divisions to make one quarter's numbers, and as a result killed the possibility of future growth. (Lucent, anyone?)

In public companies, shareholder's and investors put pressure on management for short-term gains. As a result, management has a short-term focus and often makes decisions allowing them to cash out before the negatives are realized (this is the case with most mergers of big companies).

I very intentionally went to work for a privately held company. We make decisions for the long-term. Sometimes we intentionally lose money one year to guarantee 3 or 5 years of growth. For the past 25 years, analysts have been predicting that my employer will go public (as most of our competitors are). These analysts clearly do not understand the culture at our company or the reasons we remain privately held.