| I've read the article and that's one more argument for me that IPO is a very toxic thing sometimes.
mass marketing strategy/creating a commodity is a very hard longplay game. the prize is a huge stake of the market, but it's very challenging to get there. now assume you have your revenue and then you get two customers that are going to pay you 25% of your current revenue (20% of the revenue after they start working with you). if you're private you just stick to your strategy and count these two clients as some random money (as they don't fit your main strategy). being public, now, if you lose these customers - you're at risk, the market forces you to make decisions, to keep these customers, to go to the enterprise market, hire sales people etc. "In Twilio’s earliest days, multiple angel investors and VCs told Twilio’s founders that focusing on software developers would never lead to a venture-scale business. To make their case, Twilio’s skeptics pointed out that software developers have no control over budgets in the enterprise. But Lawson, Cooke, and Wolthius were undeterred. They believed deeply that software developers held the keys to the future…and not just of telecom, but perhaps the whole world." well now, being public you can't just do this. imagine Amazon listening to advise to use retail-chains (system integrators in Twilio case), or should Amazon do really care about revenue coming from one specific customer (even if it's huge)? it's really hard to keep doing what you believe you need to do when you're under pressure of the public market. I absolutely understand why do such companies go public, but that makes me sad. |