I mean why didn't they IPO last year with everyone else?
PC has spoken admirably of Koch Industries and he thinks there's some merit to remaining private. That's probably why. I don't have the source at hand but probably one of his podcasts.
I feel like it makes sense for Koch to stay private since their work mostly focuses on fossil fuels and specifically fracking. Public markets can be a big distraction with protests and what not. Is stripe worried about being cancelled?
No, he's saying literally they did reach X market cap in a public market. He was correcting facts of the previous poster.
If Shaq lifts me up so I can dunk, you can say that I dunked, but in general it's more accurate to evaluate things under more normal circumstances.
Right, but that not OP's point. OP said that insane valuations reached in private markets can't be reached in public markets. Public markets can be just as irrational as private markets
While you're right that you have to account for the entire organization, not just the engineers (obviously), the gap between what the owners earn compared to all other employees combined is still wildly disproportionate. It's of course hard to precisely quantify these things, but the worsening gap between worker and owner incomes is quite obviously not proportional to any change in how much value owners add to a corp…
This same argument also applies to owners. If the org makes $100k in revenue and the owners take $10k of that, why don't you just leave to start your own firm and keep it all? It's because there ARE contributions from the owner, even a passive owner has what I called "dividends from stored labor": they took on the risk, created a functioning company solving a problem, did the work of organizing the systems/structure…
No one says that owners are not entitled to a piece of the revenue, obviously they are, and doubly so when they are also doing their own work for the company.
My point was that owners currently get a disproportionately large piece, and that the gap between what owners get vs what workers get has been widening with time. And not only is it widening, but it is doing so while the relative contributions to the business' success are often narrowing (give the huge increases in worker productivity in most domains).
Is that amazing? It might actually be the standard way. Google - better search. Search was "solved", just not well. Zoom - better video chat. It was "solved", not well. Amazon - they've never done anything original, always just better. Online books was done, colo servers were a thing. Apple - same. Telsa - better electric cars. Airbnb - better short term rental market. Salesforce - better CRM. Snowflake - better data…
I think you’re selectively choosing what constitutes “new” vs. “better”. As Henry Ford said, if you ask people what they want they’ll tell you a faster horse. It’s not as if the automobile wasn’t new and revolutionary, but nobody cares about cars. They care about getting around. And a way to get around that was faster, more powerful and more reliable…that was new. It’s the details that matter. If you take your view,…
You just noted an exception, and they exist.
The moon landing wasn't a product.
"New" v "better" isn't saying something is or isn't noteworthy. Tesla is a hell of a story. So is SpaceX. So is Apple. So is Google. Amazing technical leaps. All noteworthy, all creating immense value.
Is it unusual for a successful company like Stripe to take so long to go public? It seems like their house is in order, and they are profitable, but employees aren't liquid.
Considering they just emailed all former employees asking for up-to-date contact information, I think that an IPO is rather imminent.
Maybe our goal as a society shouldn’t be to decide who gets rich, but rather to do what it takes to ensure fair distribution of resources such that everyone’s basic needs for food, housing, healthcare, and education are met. That’s difficult to do when wealth is concentrated among a very small group of people.
That’s also difficult when people set up dichotomies like Bezos vs his workers and disregard the entire world.
No, not really. Pointing out the injustice of a company mistreating and burning out its workers in order to produce one of the richest billionaires, usefully illustrates the inequality we face globally.
I think that this is not just a story-telling problem. It is a wealth-sharing problem as well. I don't know much about stripe, but think of Bezos as a pretty good example - to a O(n) rounding he has 100 billion dollars and 1 million employees. Why is he getting 100,000 from each employee ? Not because those employees send him a cheque. But because of particular outcomes of share capital, and corporate law. Decisions…
> It is a wealth-sharing problem as well. I don't know much about stripe, but think of Bezos as a pretty good example - to a O(n) rounding he has 100 billion dollars and 1 million employees. Why is he getting 100,000 from each employee? I used to work for Amazon. I did not give Jeff Bezos $100,000. In fact, I actually made money out of the deal.
I used to work for Amazon. I did not give Jeff Bezos $100,000. In fact, I actually made money out of the deal.
If you were a fairly senior SWE then customers gave Amazon a few million dollars for the work you did. Jeff got $2.8m, you $200k. On paper it's unfair, unreasonable, and unbalanced, but you agreed to it, and without Jeff you would have earned less. Maybe it's fine.
> It is a wealth-sharing problem as well. I don't know much about stripe, but think of Bezos as a pretty good example - to a O(n) rounding he has 100 billion dollars and 1 million employees. Why is he getting 100,000 from each employee? I used to work for Amazon. I did not give Jeff Bezos $100,000. In fact, I actually made money out of the deal.
By its nature, you get more value out of an employee than you pay in wages. Otherwise, there would be no point to hiring anyone.
By its nature, the employee's wages are more valuable to them than the time and effort they are expending on the job. Otherwise, there would be no point to working.
What's happening here is gains from trade. I have a lot of free time and a set of skills, while my employer has a lot of money and the willingness to shoulder the risk that the work they're asking me to do won't be profitable for them in the long run. Both sides get something out of the deal.
> It is a wealth-sharing problem as well. I don't know much about stripe, but think of Bezos as a pretty good example - to a O(n) rounding he has 100 billion dollars and 1 million employees. Why is he getting 100,000 from each employee? I used to work for Amazon. I did not give Jeff Bezos $100,000. In fact, I actually made money out of the deal.
It's about how and why the deal was structured that way. Amazon is structured so that there is net 100,000 dollars of wealth in the deal betweeen you and him that goes to him (whatever goes to you, he also gets 100k. I am sure you have no complaints, but why the 100k? why can't that be 50k to him and 50k to you.? Or 33, 33 and 33 extra in tax? or ... And is the particular arrangement something that is fundamental and…
Fine, so what's stopping you from starting a business that does exactly the same thing Amazon does, except you make less money and you pay your employees more, and then you go ahead and poach Amazon's entire workforce? If that's actually possible, you should do that, because if you only end up half as rich as Jeff Bezos, you'll still be rich and all of your employees will be better off. What's stopping you?
> It is a wealth-sharing problem as well. I don't know much about stripe, but think of Bezos as a pretty good example - to a O(n) rounding he has 100 billion dollars and 1 million employees. Why is he getting 100,000 from each employee? I used to work for Amazon. I did not give Jeff Bezos $100,000. In fact, I actually made money out of the deal.
I used to work for Amazon. I did not give Jeff Bezos $100,000. In fact, I actually made money out of the deal. If you were a fairly senior SWE then customers gave Amazon a few million dollars for the work you did. Jeff got $2.8m, you $200k. On paper it's unfair, unreasonable, and unbalanced, but you agreed to it, and without Jeff you would have earned less. Maybe it's fine.
> If you were a fairly senior SWE then customers gave Amazon a few million dollars for the work you did.
This was early in my career, and I didn't work on anything customer facing, but there's still no guarantee of that. What if I'd worked on the Fire Phone?