Hacker News Reader

Comment by 40acres | Hacker News Reader

After years of companies refusing to go public (looking at you Stripe), it's almost refreshing to see a hyped tech go actually IPO.

View on HN

Is it actually refreshing? It's actually refreshing to see Stripe staying private for so long. That means, they have a sustainable business model, and can take on projects that might benefit users in the long term despite negative short term consequences instead of focus on growing at all cost for the most part.

Sustainable business models that need insano numbers of funding rounds?

We don’t actually know if their business model is sustainable. If they were public we would have a better answer to this.

Becoming public allows everyday people to access the wealth generation machine your created.

Sometimes I think that the endless cynicism around corporations that exists online is the real ploy by capitalists to keep people poor. It seems to be pretty damn effective at making people allergic to claiming their slice of the pie.

Not after the insiders and investors milked most of the upsides already. As of today:

- ABNB right at around their IPO price. - Uber is 75% up… after 6 years. - SNOW came back to break even only after the recent surge.

Again, you can be a cynic and let others have your slice.

What’s your argument besides name calling?

Please have it all, as long as don’t force my passive investments to be part of it.

You cherry-picked examples. Counter examples would be:

Crowdstrike up 1067% Cloudflare up 1408% Robinhood up 148%

For an index fund, I would take a break even or even a slight loss on AirBnb to get those Crowdstrike and Cloudflare returns. I do agree with the overall sentiment that the foundation AI companies are overvalued but the whole point of an index fund is not have to analyze each individual company.

You examples are great… at supporting my points. CRWD ipo’ed at 7bn and NET at 5bn. Unlike the mega IPOs like abnb and uber and now 10x worse spacex. There is very limited upside left after high valuation milking.

Stripe has done 24 funding rounds. It's not really sustainability, they've just created a second market that isn't so public.

How does Stripe need funding anyway, aren't they just a payment network with a low effort risk platform? It really shouldn't be hard for them to have reliable, sustainable, predictable finances.

Jeeze 8500 employees. Even then though.

"Going public" means something completely different now, especially for these companies in the news (Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, etc).

Going public used to mean selling a portion of your company for the capital required to grow. Ideally John Q. Public buys stock, the company grows, and they can sell the stock for more money.

These companies already have the capital required to grow from private investment, and already grew; they're behemoths. The act of "going public" are those private investors using the public market to cash out their investment. The exponential growth the public buyers are expecting to see has most likely already happened.

I recall thinking the same thing when Apple and Microsoft hit $1tn. Here we are less than a decade later and they’re up 3-400%.

Microsoft and Apple had decades of profitable years before hitting a trillion. AI companies are seeking trillion dollar IPOs without profits, selling a service well below its actual cost.

And they had a moat that didn't depend on a competitor not releasing a better model.

Stripe seems to be doing fairly well as a private company. They continually offer liquidity events for employees to cash out, while also retaining less pressure for hypergrowth from outside activists and investors.

Companies rush to IPO because they think the price they are selling at is so high that it outweighs the painful nature of being a public company.

The days of capital light companies might be over for the near future.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com