I’m still trying to get my head around the news that, after years of badmouthing public equity markets, Steve Schwarzman is thinking of taking Blackstone Group public. It does nicely underscore the basic truth of the private equity business, which is that without public markets on which to buy and sell companies, it couldn’t exist. [...]
In the summer of 1999, I paid a visit to a little startup in downtown Palo Alto. I was working on a Fortune article about Inktomi, then the new power in Internet search, and the startup was a nascent competitor. I sat down with its president–a kid named Sergey–and he questioned Inktomi’s strategy of building [...]
