The reporting isn’t the drawbacks of being public, it’s the investors.

They get to _choose_ who they let in if they are private (by definition).

They don’t need the public’s money and don’t want the headache of dealing with the public. I’d completely agree if I were them.

Disclaimer: ex-stripe who is still an investor.

When I was an employee of a subsidiary of Infospace, my RSUs were always worthless (honestly, I don't remember if any vested while I was there), at Yahoo, we could generally trade, although one shouldn't trade immediately after earnings, but I don't remember if this was enforced at the affiliated brokerage. At Facebook, I think it was typically a three week window every quarter.

Of course, if you quit, the windows are no longer in force, although if you have material non-public information, you're still not allowed to trade. Maybe there'a a share price where you'd rather quit and sell than hold on until the window opens.

AFAIK none of the recent tenders have been self-funded. They’ve matched external investors who want shares with employees.

Also, not sure what you mean by "tiny". It's been billions of dollars.

The tender offer announced in the article is open to former employees as well, so they personally profit regardless of Stripe being public (unless the claim is that by being public the valuation would be materially higher than the stated valuation for this offer).

I don't think PE buyouts are the right comparison here; we're talking about companies that never go public versus the ones that do.

And, of course private companies fail at a much higher rate. The set of private companies includes every company that doesn't succeed to the point where it has the realistic choice to go public. Again: wrong comparison.

Private equity is vs not going public in the first place though. Private equity is also the wrong measure because there's good private equity and bad private equity, and we most commonly hear about bad private equity. Eg Toys'R'us. Typically when buying a company, in order to but the company in the first place, PE saddles the company up with debt in order to make the purchase in the first place (which is bananas in the first if you think about it). So then the distressed company now has additional debt payments to make. Making their already distressed situation even worse. Now, the theory is that PE is able to make the company more "efficient" with their PE know-how, and sometimes they do. There's no time machine too go back and undo the PE purchase of Toys'r'us and see what would have actually unfolded, but what we can say is having to make additional debt payments hastened their demise.

So it's true PE taking a company private has a high failure rate as far as the continuation of the company, the question is if the goal of PE is for the company to continue in the first place, or if that gets in the way of them extracting as money as possible as fast as possible. So 50% is certainly a statistic, but not useful for comparison, especially if we're looking at a private company staying private.

Needing to maximize shareholder value is a myth. There is no law that requires you to do that - people like to use the idea as an excuse to do scummy business.

IPOs result in companies cutting corners and offering worse service so they can offer more benefits to rich stockholders this quarter, so they can cash out and burn the company to move on to the next one. Private companies plan for their existence 10 years down the road.

Why should anyone be entitled to stocks of a company?

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How would becoming a public company be better for all of society?

Stock markets are not entirely logical from my understanding.

If you bought Stripe at a 95b valuation in 2021 your returns are barely keeping up with the SP500 after this latest round. Not exactly an elite capital growth machine.

Even for good investments, investors will want to sell at some point rather than owning an investment forever, if only to diversify.

The early VCs have been in Stripe for 16 years already. They need Stripe to IPO so they can get liquidity in order to provide returns to their LPs. VCs can't hold onto the stock forever, they need to provide DPI otherwise they won't be able to raise future funds.

> The cost of that liquidity is missing out on realizing future growth though.

Why would it be? I don't believe an IPO has to be dilutive, it can be done with already issued shares. I grant you that's not usually how they're done though.

Maybe certain types of growth aren't the goal for Stripe at present.

They can, but it's orders of magnitudes less liquid than the public stock market.

Liquidity!= ability to liquidate or not, BTW, it's more of a continuous spectrum.

You let me know when VISA lets you colocate into their rack for processing payments with your built in a weekend vibe coded project.

I know you mean this with a /s, but hey, we just need a proper File Transfer Protocol, an SQL-lite database server, and some simple vibe coded python business logic, no test cases required.

What can go wrong... (/s just in case as well)

in 2 hours with claude code