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Comment by fourseventy | Hacker News Reader

To give liquidity to investors.

The cost of that liquidity is missing out on realizing future growth though. It's fairly safe to assume that as there isn't an IPO yet the investors want to hold rather than cash in returns. They probably believe there's more growth potential, and that the board are the right people to deliver it.

> 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.

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.

Perhaps infrastructure has a different kind of long term upside.

You forgot to mention its valuation grew by 2.6x in the previous 3 months. 2021 was different thing altogether with the money printing.

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

Sure, at some point. Maybe that isn't now though.

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

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.

Don’t they already get to participate in secondary markets to liquidate?

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.

I see, thanks for the clarification.

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