Comment by ve55 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ve55 | Hacker News Reader

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Going public comes with a lot of work, expectations, obligations, and has a high requirement for corporate maturity. It's not easy, not always desirable, and it's definitely not feasible to do early on most of the time.

I think what we actually want is the ability for us normal people to invest in private companies more easily, rather than for private companies to become public more easily. This is difficult partially due to the SEC and partially due to historic reasons for how private equity is generally allocated and traded, but I'm hoping it gets better some time.

But I share the sentiment, I'm continually disappointed when there's a company I really want to invest in, but I know that I won't get a chance to buy it until 5 years later when it has already 100x'd and then just gets IPO dumped to retail, becoming more of a short-term casino (e.g. see all recent tech IPOs) instead of long-term bet placed intelligently early-on in the race.

If I could purchase shares in anything from Stripe to Discord to even Chik-fil-A (not to mention a certain 10 or so certain YC companies...), I would in a heartbeat (and I'd be willing to pay a premium for this too!), but the privilege likely won't be given to me until I no longer desire it.

> Going public comes with a lot of work, expectations, obligations, and has a high requirement for corporate maturity.

>I think what we actually want is the ability for us normal people to invest in private companies more easily

I think these two sentiments both make sense and are in tension with one another. A lot of the work of going public is putting the company into a state that outsiders can understand. Preparing a prospectus isn't just writing down what exists, it's ensuring that there are controls in place to check that expectations are being fulfilled.

An individual can decide that one or more of the requirements to go public aren't important to their particular investment strategy, but that choice involves a certain level of expertise about how public companies work v.s. how this particular private company works. So you're really suggesting that we should let individuals make their own choices about if the current circumstances of a private company make it suitable for investment. That's, as you said, a lot of work. We generally demand companies do that work before they can receive money from public markets. It's unfair, because it means wealthy individuals can get in early on companies, but the whole reason they can decide which companies to get into early is that their wealth gives them access to the resources to evaluate these companies. Allowing people to enter into investments they don't have the resources to evaluate is not going to, on average, help people build wealth.

Personally, I think we could have more "levels" of public-ness. But I'm also aware of the penny-stock scams of the recent decades and think that opening up private companies to early investment has all of the same problems.

This is an important point to make; usually I am in favor of letting people do anything that they want to, however, the higher-risk it is, the more we should require them to demonstrate knowledge of that risk. But, critically, I'd prefer it to be about knowledge, rather than net worth or social connections. This is still much easier said than done (and as we saw from cryptocurrency IPOs, there are disastrous consequences from just letting people invest in anything they want to with zero laws or accountability, but that is obviously one extreme end), but I think there's still some room for easy improvement.

Are you familiar with EquityZen and Forge? If you're accredited, they can make it feasible to invest in a number of private companies. Companies can make that difficult by exercising their ROFR consistently, but many don't.

Wait can I really invest in stripe and buy shares before they go public using EquityZen? Is this correct?

AFAICT Stripe is one of those that aggressively ROFRs. I’ve been trying to invest in them for a while, but no luck.

It's an option to note, I haven't used them as I'm not sure I'd have a good chance of being able to get what I want (since obviously there has to be a seller for me to buy), and the fees also seem pretty notable (5%, and/or up to 2% annual), maybe with some other potential issues of distribution/ownership (it seems it's not equivalent to owning the shares, but owning part of another entity that does own the shares). But, it may be a lot nicer than nothing for some, so thanks for reminding me of it.

The fees are actually a bit higher, 5% from the buyer and 5% from the seller. I haven’t seen a management fee with either of those, though, at least with the single issue purchases - their multi-company funds might be different.

And you do own shares in an SPV instead of owning the shares outright, but that’s a lot of what makes the lower minimums possible.

What ownership/distribution issues have you seen?

Have you used either? What did you buy and did any of them go public - what happened then?

Yes, I’ve used both over the past few years to invest in SpaceX, NextDoor, and Cerebras. None of those have gone public, but I believe that once they do, the shares are transferred out of the SPV into a brokerage account.

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