Content area
Full text
Sitting in his office in early 2002, Victor Tsao said he realized things would have to change.
Yearly sales at his small but growing Linksys Group Inc. were approaching the $400 million mark-thanks to nearly 30% annual expansion. The seller of home networking gear soon would outpace the plans he and wife Janie had for the company.
The Tsaos grasped that Linksys would need to move into more global markets, expand research spending and hire more people. While Linksys was flush with cash, expansion would be costly. The privately held company needed more money.
"It was going to be M&A or IPO," Victor Tsao said.
So Tsao put out feelers to investment banks. By spring of last year, he'd settled on New York's CS First Boston Corp.
The task: determine if a buyout outweighed a public stock offering, something Linksys long had seen in its future.
"We had no urgency at all then," Tsao said. CS First Boston, which counted Cisco Systems Inc. as a client, called up Chief Executive John Chambers to...