A short talk arguing against treating an IPO as a destination: founders and employees may view IPO as a finish line leading to attrition or disappointment. The speaker emphasizes focusing on long-term mission (building a 100-year company), customer impact, and notes that private markets now provide liquidity levels once unique to public markets, making IPOs only one of several liquidity paths.
Chapters
A lot of founders, CEOs actually get wrong. You know, they start talking about an IPO internally as a destination, employees start anchoring to that and thinking about it as a finish line for the company. And then the IPO happens and you see a huge amount of attrition and or worse, the IPO doesn't happen. You see a huge amount of attrition because that's what everyone's kind of hanging around for. So I, I think about really orienting our team around the mission and the idea that we're building a 100 year enduring company here and we're focused on our customers, we're focused on transforming the business and there's going to be milestone markers along the way. But if we, if we do have an IPO and we're reaching a scale, I mean, even the Series F was larger than most IPOs in terms of the amount of money raised in typical IPOs. 150 million, 200 million in that ballpark. So we're obviously, you know, 4 or 5x that from a size perspective. I think the private markets have really transformed in the last five years. And you can achieve a lot in the private markets that you used to be able to achieve only in the public markets, like that amount of liquidity. An IPO is not the only way of doing that.
