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You can imagine that Stripe CEO Patrick Collison is asked a lot<\/em> about whether his San Francisco-based payments company plans to go pubic any time soon. Last year, the seven-year-old company raised $150 million<\/a> in a deal co-led by General Catalyst Partners and CapitalG\u00a0that valued the startup at $9.2 billion, almost double the valuation it was assigned in 2015.<\/p>\n Altogether, it\u00a0has raised $440 million, shows Crunchbase<\/a>.<\/p>\n Still,\u00a0don\u2019t expect an IPO any time soon, Collison stated very explicitly at the\u00a0the Launch conference<\/a> in San Francisco earlier today. While industry observers like to note the\u00a0sustained and seemingly unstoppable success of gun-slinging Amazon, which went public in 1997, just three years after its founding, Collison argued that it was harder for Amazon at the outset than many seem to recall.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you look at the Amazon daily history [as a public company], they had an incredibly turbulent time for their first couple of years,\u201d he told interviewer and Launch founder Jason Calacanis. \u201cNow in 2017\u00a0. . . it all looks great. But they had a tough time at the beginning and I think this is a broader structural challenge across the industry.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, the\u00a0point \u2014 that it\u2019s far harder to take\u00a0risks as a public\u00a0company \u2014 has been endlessly argued for and against in recent years, by both people who\u00a0think staying private as long as possible makes sense as long as\u00a0capital is available<\/a>, and those who argue that going public provides companies with cash to do things like acquire other companies<\/a>.<\/p>\n It\u2019s an argument that Collison preemptively argued, in fact, saying\u00a0today that,\u00a0\u201cBeing a public company certainly doesn\u2019t stop you from taking a really long-term time horizon, but it does make it more difficult.<\/p>\n \u201cFrom our standpoint, becoming a public company makes sense when you\u2019ve reached some point of stability, some plateau \u00a0\u2014 [when] you\u2019ve done the stuff that you at least initially set out to. And we haven\u2019t. We\u2019re still very early in this trajectory that we first established. And because we work with startups, they themselves have lengthy trajectories, so this is just going to have to be \u2014 when you\u2019re building infrastructure \u2014 long time horizons are involved.\u201d<\/p>\n A remaining\u00a0question for Stripe, and many other unicorn companies, is what happens to employees who may be itching to get liquid but can\u2019t. Undoubtedly, it\u2019s something Collison and company will also be dealing with more and more, particularly as other well-known \u201cunicorns\u201d test the public markets.<\/p>\n Here, though,\u00a0Collison was a little less forthcoming onstage, acknowledging that employee liquidity is an \u201cindustry-wide\u201d issue yet avoiding answering whether he\u2019s in favor of secondary sales that allow them to sell a percentage of their shares.<\/p>\n What he said:\u00a0\u201cPart of what makes [this decision] challenging are there are so many constituencies \u2014 not just those here in Silicon Valley but the regulators and most notably the SEC and so on, right?,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve spent time with people who\u2019ve spent a very long time analyzing this and really digging into the regulatory details and I think you\u2019re starting to see a real appetite in many places to figure out a better model because ultimately, to the extent that the public markets make it harder to really long-term time horizon around innovation, that\u2019s really bad for the country overall. It\u2019s bad for investors, too.\u201d<\/p>\n What he didn\u2019t say: He\u2019s not a fan of employees cashing out early, which\u00a0seems to be the case. At least, Shriram Bhashyam, co-founder of EquityZen, a platform that enables startup employees to\u00a0sell their nonpublic equity compensation, says his understanding is that Stripe \u201chas restrictions in place that require board approval for employees to transfer their shares.\u201d<\/p>\n A source familiar with the company\u2019s regime\u00a0says those\u00a0restrictions are toughest for newer employees to get around. According to this person, early Stripe employees were allowed to sell some shares, but the company subsequently amended its bylaws to clamp down on the practice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"\"](\"https:\/\/tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com\/2013\/10\/patrick-collison-headshot1.jpg?w=680\")
You can imagine that Stripe CEO Patrick Collison is asked a lot about whether his San Francisco-based payments company plans to go pubic any time soon. Last year, the seven-year-old company raised $150 million in a deal co-led by General Catalyst Partners and CapitalG that valued the startup at $9.2 billion, almost double the valuation it was assigned in 2015. Read More<\/a><\/p>\n\n<\/img><\/a>
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