Once again, I link to Mahesh Murthy’s column in Business World and this time it’s on Google’s unusual IPO listing :

Typically a company would say it needed to raise some round sum of money. But in Google’s filing, the number was $2,718, 281,828… Exactly two billion seven hundred and eighteen million and some dollars. I giggled, for as any student who’s tried to forget maths knows, this number (2.718281828) is the constant ‘e’. And instead of raising $2.5 billion or $3 billion, Google wanted to raise exactly $e billion.

Google has never shied away from being itself. From the dress code – t-shirts and jeans – to the website that has been adamantly simple. While the world has rushed to fill their sites with Flash animations and features, these people have the confidence to speak their minds.

Google won’t play ball. We can’t predict the future, they say, and hence we can’t give forecasts. So please don’t ask us. They paraphrase their hero, Warren Buffet, and say: “We won’t ‘smooth’ quarterly or annual results: If earnings figures are lumpy when they reach headquarters, they will be lumpy when they reach you.”

Now, I am not advocating that we all go out and subscribe to this stock. All I’m trying to say is that here’s a company that operates in the same space as conventional (multi-billion dollar) organizations do, but has the courage to do things its own way.

And that’s admirable.

P.S. Get the entire details here.