After going public, one founder swapped misaligned VCs for public shareholders who actually respect long-term thinking. Activist investors are rare despite high-profile cases at Twilio and Autodesk. Public markets can be less troublesome than venture capital if you manage them right.
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These things are a much bigger pain in the ass than public events. Can I just build on that? Like in Silicon Valley, there's, I think it's kind of Stripe is really, uh, beating the drum on this. Like, why the heck would we ever go public? It's sort of that sentiment out there. Cause there's so much private capital. You can do secondaries. I don't know if a violent disagreement is there, but I think it's just people are nervous about what's on the other side. And my take on it was like, We were a private company. We had a bunch of quirky, slightly misaligned venture capital investors who were definitely in our shorts. Then we flipped to public and then all of them, we got rid of those VCs. Now we had a bunch of quirky, slightly misaligned public investors who were less in our shorts. It's actually better in a lot of ways than being private. Pretty rare. And I have found the public investors to be pretty rational. If you paint them a picture of what will happen over a long period of time, if you are pretty conservative with your numbers, they're rational and they'll stick with you.
I think they're underrated and I think people think it's like scary, something scary over there. It's not as scary as people think. I have a lot of founders who say, I'm terrified of the activist investors. I'm terrified about what happened to Jeff at Twilio. This is my company. This is my life. I don't want to have that happen to me. What would you say to that founder?
It's pretty rare what happened to Jeff. I mean, everyone talks about Jeff, everyone talks about Autodesk, everyone talks about Zendesk, but It's pretty rare.
I am a "people should go public" person.
VCs are a much bigger pain in the ass than public investors.
We are much— agreed. Let's add that to the B-roll. I think VCs are a much bigger pain in the ass than the typical public investor and slightly less of a pain in the ass than the public activist investor.
