I'm sure they already have more than the 500 non-accredited or 2000 accredited shareholder total that would trigger most of those reporting requirements anyways. So Stripe already has most of the drawbacks of being a public company without the benefits.

I'd say it has advantages and disadvantages.

One advantage is that whales can't play around with the stock price, say VCs dumping stocks at an unfortunate moment and putting pressure on the price. But it's also just wall street folks doing price manipulation for options schemes that can be an issue (it's illegal but has low enforcement if you are rich and well connected). Also lower chance of activist investors, and less of a quarterly pressure to show nice numbers, etc.

The advantage is also a disadvantage: minority shareholders of non-public companies have much less rights than those of public ones, and that includes employees. That's part of why you are dependent on the founder's goodwill on whether a startup exit can screw over rank and file employees or not. I'm not sure how much that danger is still out there if the company is doing tender offers, but it might still exist actually. Similarly, you can structure tender offers in a way that say former employees are disadvantaged, and many other arbitrary criteria.

Note that this depends greatly on the jurisdiction, e.g. in Germany there is legislation that's unfriendly to minority shareholders even for public companies, e.g. visible in the Varta takeover, imo part of why the idea of adding stocks to pensions will be ripe for money grabbing schemes of whales against the smaller owners.

Also employee of private company with tender offers, but not Stripe. Opinions my own.

Do very many companies provide daily liquidity? Most of my time getting RSUs have had trading windows, once a quarter if you're lucky.

Also ex-Stripe. This suggests an opportunity to build an exchange that addresses these problems. Could one build an exchange with deliberate "turn-based" liquidity to avoid the problem of daily stock price distraction, for example? (This is hard because there will always be secondary markets, but presumably this is already the case.)

I get the feeling that the founders will not bend and invest for long term and not quarterly, as a non ex-stripe at least judging by their patience to IPO

The latest self funded tenders have been pretty tiny. I wouldn’t term it as “liquidity” as much as a symbolic gesture.

Instead they are mostly owned by VC's, who will more directly pressure them to do that than the general public owners will.

The important part is that the Collison's control Stripe now. When that changes things may go down hill. It won't matter if it is public or not.

As opposed to VC owners, who are famously satisfied with slow growth. Right?

And VCs are what, patient angels who invest their money out of the goodness of their hearts expecting no returns?

If they are ex-Stripe they are likely holding shares, and so yes they would personally profit from going public.

There may be a conflict of interest with ex-Stripe folks wanting to see a move towards x or y.

> An IPO today is mainly a way for major investors

Major investors and insiders. Stay the hell away from IPOs if you're not an institution getting access to shares at a reasonable price.