Dear Unicorn, Exit Please
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Dear Unicorn, Exit Please
1–10 of 124 posts
Re: Dear Unicorn, Exit Please
#2Unicorns feel like an artifact of making it a little too hard to go public.
Re: Dear Unicorn, Exit Please
#3Unicorns feel like an artifact of making it a little too hard to go public.
Exactly, no one wants the additional overhead, requirements, and legalities that go along with going public.
Re: Dear Unicorn, Exit Please
#4Why isn't it easier for employees to sell shares of private companies?
Re: Dear Unicorn, Exit Please
#5Why isn't it easier for employees to sell shares of private companies?
Because there's no one they can sell their shares to. With a public company, you can sell your shares on the stock market.
Re: Dear Unicorn, Exit Please
#6While it's no doubt annoying for those involved, I find myself unable to sympathize much with the woes and travails of those poor stock-holding employees of private firms with skyrocketing valuations.
Cry me a river, basically. If this is a serious issue that needs to be addressed, it's at most inside baseball not worth the rest of us worrying about.
Re: Dear Unicorn, Exit Please
#7Unicorns feel like an artifact of making it a little too hard to go public.
Exactly, no one wants the additional overhead, requirements, and legalities that go along with going public.
That might be a good thing. I'm still not convinced that a lot of these high-flying "unicorns" are really worth their valuations in a meaningful way. If Uber were to go public today, they'd immediately switch from "startup cutting legal corners" to "entrenched corporation doing illegal-ish things". Pulling back the covers of their financials is one thing that would bring an outcry of how much money they make off the backs of people that they dump liability onto.
The overhead, requirements and legalities are there for a reason. If you've raised $10b, you can afford the overhead dollar amount; but can you afford the visibility?
Re: Dear Unicorn, Exit Please
#8The honest reality of unicorn'hood is also that your post-IPO performance is almost assured to be flattish (on average) with potential for swings in either direction of course. So when you look at the delta between your strike price and your actual potential future IPO price -- that is really probably the net of the win you can hope to achieve... and often it's not as good as you'd hope.
Re: Dear Unicorn, Exit Please
#9Why isn't it easier for employees to sell shares of private companies?
Because there's no one they can sell their shares to. With a public company, you can sell your shares on the stock market.
Perhaps they should be able to sell their shares back to the company? The company would be responsible for raising more money and have some allocation for share buyback.
Re: Dear Unicorn, Exit Please
#10Well that's what you get for taking stocks in a private company I guess. I never do it because it's just dumb. Unless you want to be tied to that company for ever don't do that. But who knows, I don't live in the same world as you people.