has also pushed companies to more fully disclose the negative aspects of their business, which often appear in long sections listing the “risk factors” faced by firms. There is, to be sure, a counterpoint to the trend: during the plain-English era, the S.E.C. With equal parts Mason’s cuteness and Page and Brin’s triumphalism, he declared: The apotheosis came a year later, with a letter from Mark Zuckerberg tucked inside Facebook’s S-1. It urged Groupon to move the letter down in the filing, so that readers could absorb some more substantial information first.) Andrew Mason began his company’s S-1 with a letter declaring that “Life is too short to be a boring company.” The Wall Street Journal weighed in again, calling the letter “ wacky” in a blog post and noting its similarity to the Google co-founders’ missive. The filing was “ unusual,” the Wall Street Journal wrote. Google’s filing also included a letter to shareholders from its co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, that included the section headings “ DON’T BE EVIL” and “ MAKING THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE.” No one had ever seen such a thing. designs, develops, produces, markets and services microprocessor-based personal computer systems for individual use in solving computing problems commonly encountered in business, education, science, engineering and in the home.” Twenty-four years later, Google’s company description began: “Google is a global technology leader focused on improving the ways people connect with information.” In Apple’s 1980 prospectus, the company described itself like this: “Apple Computer, Inc. Then, at around the same time, came the plain-English rule and the Internet-and, suddenly, public documents were far easier to read and access. in paper form, which meant that the general public couldn’t quickly dig them up. Plus, they were filed by companies and stored by the S.E.C. Not long ago, we didn’t read S-1s for fun they were unintelligible and boring.

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