I disagree with another HN commenter on the value of this article. Taking two backward steps through Eric Schmidt's conclusion:
- "I wouldn’t change a thing - except maybe (an interview that Playboy published putting Google in breach of the SEC-mandatory quiet period)"
- "To this day I can’t fully explain why our stock price opened so high—causing the pop we had tried to avoid [Google sold its shares at $85; three days later people were selling what they'd bought at $110]. A lot of complicated factors played a role" (none of which are discussed).

Basically, they screwed up, left a huge amount of money on the table, and he doesn't admit to the possibility of any possible improvements, the possibility that doing the IPO at that time was the wrong call, or discuss the factors behind the pop despite their strategy to try and avoid it.

Firstly, Could Google not have just stayed privately owned, but published its financial records for a few years, before then doing their IPO? From this article it doesn't sound like the IPO cash was particularly important at that point, and the meteoric rise in the share price suggests (with 20:20 hindsight) that they let far too much go, far too early on. The crucial paragraph doesn't discuss the decision process to do the IPO, it only lists the options. That's disappointing.

As for why they went for a Dutch auction - to bust the institutional racket (good on them) and because "It was consistent with the auction-based business model we used to sell our ads, so we felt we understood the underlying dynamics, and it had a strong intuitive appeal for us." Clearly that understanding wasn't worth shit - it doesn't seem to have helped them predict anything about what happened in the auction. The anti-establishment attitude was really commendable, but it seems like it was a huge strategic mistake. Some factors may of course have been out of their hands - public inexperience/wariness with the Dutch auction format leading to low initial bidding, pseudo-concerted action to keep the bids low, etc. But that's a strategic mistake which a strategy exec should be owning up to. The two first weeks in August before the bidding opened were stuffed with terrible Google news (and he sets up a surprise Playboy publication of an April interview as a paper tiger - but see the diagram in the article for the rest). They got pushed into August because of the complexity, and it is a bad month to do an IPO, but he says they didn't care.

He bemoans the press for portraying their approach as 'hubristic' and therefore worth staying away from. Yet the press was spot on with their analysis of the factual situation - it was hubristic, seemingly not particularly well thought through, or even diligently executed. What the press got wrong is in concluding that it was something to stay away from. Quite the opposite - the people who got in at the Dutch auction stage made a vast amount of money! Google didn't, though.

So I found the pomp and pride underpinning the article really quite unsubstantiated - and yes, particularly hubristic. It was innovative, done with some honest and interesting motivations, but it was a cockup, from top to bottom. I disagree that they had 'risen to the task'. They do that in their core business, undoubtedly, day in, day out, but this was a fuzzy mess and I'm always worried by CEOs who don't learn from cockups - substantially more so when they deny that the cockup even existed