$85 a Share for Another Search Company With a Funny Name? Sucker Bet, I Say.

Thursday marked the six-year anniversary of Google’s IPO, one that the tech giant’s shares celebrated with a 2 percent decline in value. GOOG closed the day at $467.97–more than five times its 2004 debut at $85, but down quite a bit from the all-time high of $741.79 in 2007.

Still, if you were fortunate enough to get in on the company’s IPO, you’ve done quite well, thanks to the 365 percent gain the company’s shares have seen in the past three years. And if you missed the boat, well, so did a lot of other folks. Take Emily Cikovsky, who did contract work for Google, preparing the PowerPoint slides and speaking notes that co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page used to announce their first venture-capital funding. Brin and Page offered to pay Cikovsky in cash or options. Cikovsky chose $4000 over options for 4,000 shares. “Do I wish I’d had the shares? Yes,” she told the Wall Street Journal back in 2004. But “what’s always in the back of my mind is an IPO is never a guarantee…and nine out of 10 start-ups fail.”