One billion dollars

My close friend and colleague, Paul Bleicher, called me yesterday and shared the news that, for the first time, Phase Forward's market cap surpassed one billion dollars during the day yesterday. It closed a little below that number as you can see in the image.
The market cap (market capitalization) number is on the PFWD Google Finance page at the top of the middle column of numbers. This is a simple calculation of the number of shares of Phase Forward that exist multiplied by the price per share at that moment. It means the market currently values the company, as a whole, at that number.

Many of you may know that Paul and I co-founded Phase Forward together more than 10 years ago. Paul is still a key member of the executive team and clearly much (most?) of Phase Forward's success is due to his creativity and hard work. Although I left after the formative years in 2000, Paul has always been generous by including my name in the history of the company. Today I salute Paul, again, and enjoy the knowledge that I had some part in creating this successful company.

1 comment:

Ish Hazon said...

There are a number of major milestones in a person's life - birth of children etc - but having a company you founded hit the billion-dollar market cap mark is clearly one of the more remarkable.

It's fascinating to make a stab at guessing just how many people in history are able to say this. I don't have the data to hand, but the number of companies with a market cap above a billion dollars is finite. I'd've thought the number would be under 10,000, and thus the number of founders who could say this well under 50,000.

In any case, it's an illustrious group that includes (for instance) Messrs Sears, Roebuck, Marks, Spencer, Ford and Gates, to name just six, so yesher koach on joining the club.

And it raises the question: if the Jewish people has a specific bracha for seeing 600,000 Jews in one place (which we do), and for one's children attaining bar or bat mitzvah, then what is or should be the bracha for seeing one's company attain the market cap of $1,000,000,000?