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by TimPC 1246 days ago
It’s honestly perplexing that so many tech companies have stayed private for such a long period of time. Especially in an era of rising interest rates and rising mortgage costs, people really want to be able to sell their stock. The difference between packages with equity you can sell and equity you can’t sell is gargantuan and there are massive benefits to having a public price that lets people fairly value that equity. Hoping to get fair value in a private market transaction is far from ideal and many employees will feel they are being forced to pay an unfair premium for liquidity.
3 comments
alephnerd 1246 days ago
Why go public when until 9-12 months ago you could raise IPO level cash ($100-300mil) in a Series D/E/F/G and with none of the SEC scrutiny. It's better for founders to remain private as long as possible. It's better for employees for companies to go public as soon as possible. For VCs it depends on what stage they are at in capital allocation (companies funded in the earlier stage of a fund will have more leeway cuz VCs don't need to pay back their investors, but companies funded at a later stage will be pushed to exit faster cuz you gotta make the investors whole)

The Collision brothers and the Hindawis (Tanium founders) have both been very vocal about this point.

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dzikimarian 1245 days ago
What's perplexing for me is that, yesterday on HN I've seen crowd with pitchforks demanding CEOs of publicly traded companies to be laid off, along with the employees for giving up to the pressure of shareholders.

Today I'm seeing ton of comments about how company has to go public, because otherwise employees (who have excellent compensation apart from stock) will have to wait a few months to liquidate their assets.

Seems like certain altitude doesn't come with MBA title, like some want to believe :-)

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Arainach 1245 days ago
After the last 6 months (to say nothing of the last few centuries of capitalism) you still believe companies care about what employees want?

Executives/Founders get loans against their illiquid but enormous equity, everyone else can go to hell as far as the decision makers are concerned.

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