Googling Future With Ghost of IPOs Past

Editor's Note: This marks the debut column of Aaron Pressman, senior market columnist. He most recently wrote about mutual funds, including the latest scandals, for Bloomberg News in Boston. Before that, he worked at publications ranging from The Bond Buyer to The Industry Standard. His past beats include IPOs, bond trading, derivatives and banking regulation. We welcome your feedback.

Google's much-anticipated IPO guidance announcement Monday sparked a heated debate over the Internet search engine's valuation. Predictably, Google is being compared with current Internet bellwethers but the hyperbole also recalls the 1990 initial public offering of another California technology company started by a pair of Stanford University alumni: Cisco Systems (CSCO Quote).

The brain-child of Stanford University grad students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Mountain View, Calif. Google said it expected to raise as much as $3.3 billion, or $135 a share, at the IPO before paying underwriting fees. That would give the company a stock market value of over $36 billion.

The value approaches Yahoo's (YHOO Quote) $38 billion market capitalization and, as many pundits noted, is slightly more than that of McDonald's (MCD Quote). Unmentioned in such facile comparisons is McDonald's $9.1 billion in long-term debt, as of March 31, compared to Google's all-equity balance sheet. ...