Everyone's locked up for six months (except a few directors who are selling into the greenshoe). You can tell people to not even look at or think about the price for six months but human nature is what it is. Everyone's going to look at the IPO price and mentally anchor that as the minimum that they'll be able to cash out their options for. Most people will mentally come up with a range of IPO price as the min and some much larger price as the max.
To have the price immediately start dropping like this is not great for employee morale.
There were some really incredulous claims around the TAM of Uber Eats (and other efforts) that were proven outrageous in the S-1 filing.
Not liquidate the company, raise money to fund user growth or tech development.
> But if you are looking to create a growth story to attract employees, partners, future investment, you may want people to think there is an upside to the stock.
In that case what matters is what happens over the next year, not what happens over the next week. If they fell to $20 this week and then stayed there for a month before gradually starting to go back up, all the better for future employees and investors who get to buy in at the lower price.
- People who joined late-stage, and that may have taken a lower salary for the upside once they IPO'd.
- Recruiting new people could be come a lot more difficult if the perception is that the stock is worth a lot less.
On top of that, after patiently waiting for years that an IPO is going to be when the fruits of their labor are reaped, but no actually it could be much later than that is not likely to help retention.