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Technology Stocks : Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rob S. who wrote (11805)	7/26/1998 3:47:00 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 164684

Hi Rob S.; About that Virtual i/O. and the Seattle business environment... V I/O's big mistake was deciding to wait until they were profitable before they went public. I was a senior design engineer there for the year up until they went bankrupt. When I hired on, they offered me stock options, but I took an extra $2000 per year instead. But if they had gone public, I would have lost out big time. Going public would have left them still in business, burning IPO cash. And man, did that company burn cash! It was disgusting to watch. And upper management didn't have a clue about their market. But they treated themselves quite well as their company slid under. The company's final months had a cash burn reduction due to belt tightening that the previous CEO should have instituted 2 years before. RIDE and the microbrewery stocks were pretty nasty stocks, too. My guess is that AMZN follows the track, but that cash they got from the IPO helped a lot. Man, I couldn't believe that the "pro-forma" profit statement didn't include interest on AMZN's big debt, cause it wasn't in "cash". What a joke! Here's a solution for every under- capitalized money losing compay out there to improve their "earnings": Convert your debt to zero-coupon! No problem! The future will take care of itself! -- I think these people have gone completely, totally, utterly, insane, presumably due to greed. Oh well. Humans believe pretty much what they want to believe, and if AMZN can fool them by ignoring their massive interest costs, then so be it. Question: In the "pro forma" results for AMZN, do they include the cash income they get from all that money they have in the bank? I imagine they don't, as it is only there due to the zero coupon debt they took on. Anybody look it up? -- Carl