Again With The IPO

I was in LA Friday, and offline, but even there folks were buzzing about the FT.com report on the Google IPO, which claimed that Google was close to going public, and was seriously considering WR Hambrecht’s auction process as its path to the public markets (caveat: The Hambrechts are friends, so I am inclined to support the auction process). Two quick thoughts: First, the reporting on this is extremely thin, with one unnamed source in the FT piece spawning a media feeding frenzy (105 articles on Google News within 24 hours), none of which had any more information, as far as I could tell, save this WashPost piece that quotes Andy Bechtolsheim, one of Google’s first investors. There’s no question Google is and has been talking to investment banks, it’d be irresponsible for them not to be, and they’ve been doing it for months. You have to wonder if that one source was an investment banker, looking to prod Google into action.
Secondly, it’s kind of fun to note that for whatever reason, the Google IPO news leads Google News itself, at least today, thanks probably to the frenzied linking around the story from the blogosphere.