A short YouTube clip (Jason M. Lemkin) presenting a conversational debate about whether startups should go public or remain private. Speaker A argues public investors are often more rational and less troublesome than venture capitalists, saying activists and hostile public outcomes (e.g., what happened to Jeff at Twilio or Zendesk) are rare. Speaker B expresses common founder fears about activists; both ultimately favor going public in this exchange. The tone is informal, anecdotal, and advisory.
Chapters
These things are a much bigger pain in the ass in public. Can I just build on that? Like in Silicon Valley, there's. I think it's kind of striped. Is really beating the drum on this. Like, why the heck would we ever go public? It's sort of that sentiment out there because there's so much private capital. You can do secondaries. I don't have a violent disagreement, but I think it's just people are nervous about what's on the other side. And my take on it was like, when 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. Then 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 that public investors be 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.
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 this, 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.
Agreed.
Let's add that to the broll.
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.
