Comment by 40acres
4 hours ago
After years of companies refusing to go public (looking at you Stripe), it's almost refreshing to see a hyped tech go actually IPO.
4 hours ago
After years of companies refusing to go public (looking at you Stripe), it's almost refreshing to see a hyped tech go actually IPO.
Is it actually refreshing? It's actually refreshing to see Stripe staying private for so long. That means, they have a sustainable business model, and can take on projects that might benefit users in the long term despite negative short term consequences instead of focus on growing at all cost for the most part.
Sustainable business models that need insano numbers of funding rounds?
We don’t actually know if their business model is sustainable. If they were public we would have a better answer to this.
Becoming public allows everyday people to access the wealth generation machine your created.
Sometimes I think that the endless cynicism around corporations that exists online is the real ploy by capitalists to keep people poor. It seems to be pretty damn effective at making people allergic to claiming their slice of the pie.
"Going public" means something completely different now, especially for these companies in the news (Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, etc).
Going public used to mean selling a portion of your company for the capital required to grow. Ideally John Q. Public buys stock, the company grows, and they can sell the stock for more money.
These companies already have the capital required to grow from private investment, and already grew; they're behemoths. The act of "going public" are those private investors using the public market to cash out their investment. The exponential growth the public buyers are expecting to see has most likely already happened.
I recall thinking the same thing when Apple and Microsoft hit $1tn. Here we are less than a decade later and they’re up 3-400%.
Microsoft and Apple had decades of profitable years before hitting a billion. These are trillion dollar IPOs without profits, selling a service well below its actual cost.
Stripe seems to be doing fairly well as a private company. They continually offer liquidity events for employees to cash out, while also retaining less pressure for hypergrowth from outside activists and investors.
The days of capital light companies might be over for the near future.
Companies rush to IPO because they think the price they are selling at is so high that it outweighs the painful nature of being a public company.