The Collision brothers and the Hindawis (Tanium founders) have both been very vocal about this point.
Today I'm seeing ton of comments about how company has to go public, because otherwise employees (who have excellent compensation apart from stock) will have to wait a few months to liquidate their assets.
Seems like certain altitude doesn't come with MBA title, like some want to believe :-)
Executives/Founders get loans against their illiquid but enormous equity, everyone else can go to hell as far as the decision makers are concerned.
It's normally the opposite. Public markets are a lot better at judging intrinsic value than a handful of VCs. Every single private company out there is either wildly over or under-valued, more so at earlier stages.
This is why companies with lousy future outlooks will sell for a lower price than their assets - debts.
There is no intrinsic value that private companies can stick to. They just have the power of controlling sales so they take sellers out of the market until they get the price they want at a volume they are comfortable with.
Stripe isn’t “intrinsically” worth anything that anyone will agree on. To one person it would be the cash in the bank minus liabilities. To someone else it would be a hefty multiple on that because they believe in the business.
- Visa has a market cap of $463B
- Mastercard $362B
- PayPal $90B
- Block $48B
Could it theoretically all be automated?
If arbitration is the reason these companies exists, it seems like bad deal.
Maybe they sell an illusion?
Have you considered that the possibility of disputes and the existence of a framework for resolving them is part of the reason for that?
The world is full of services, valuable, difficult to provide services, that a given person will never consume. Doesn't mean no one else does.
And now the bank pushed me to use Zelle - which has zero protection.
All of this to say that Bitcoin is obviously the way forward for global transactions, despite the fact it processes transactions as slow as molasses and the only way to make it faster (Lightning Network) is to sacrifice the checks and balances that maxis praise as the hallmark of Bitcoin lol
It's not a feature of cash that it can be stolen, every object can be stolen. The distinctive attribute is transactions are public and immutable.
A car can be driven by its owner anywhere they like. If someone described a car to you as a suicide box you can crash and die in - you might say yes, the fact that cars can be driven freely by their owners means you might drive into someone else. But that's a consequence of the feature, not the feature itself.
unless you store a hard wallet in your intestines and memorize the recovery words (better hope you don't forget any or your life savings is gone!)
Enough with the jokes! Real question: Sometimes you read about FBI chasing down ransomware groups and recovering Bitcoins. How do they do it? If they can identify the wallet, how do they lay claim? Do they find where the wallet is hosted and force exchange to transfer wallet to FBI?
Please don't read this post as an attempt to defend Bitcoin, nor say that FBI is a good way for me to reverse a fraudulent Bitcoin transaction!
All lies.
> unless you store a hard wallet in your intestines and memorize the recovery words (better hope you don't forget any or your life savings is gone!)
Lies. Just write them down and store them securely. You can memorize them if you like. It's also wise to store multiple physical copies in various locations to avoid this exact scenario.
> The cool thing about all of this is that it's a feature of Bitcoin to be able to irreversibly lose your life savings, without any ability to recoup your losses.
Yes, you can't be utterly careless (and I'm not sure what the argument is for wanting to be).
> the only way to make it faster (Lightning Network) is to sacrifice the checks and balances that maxis praise as the hallmark of Bitcoin
Yes, which makes sense for small transactions between trusted parties. Large transactions can and should be done on-chain (also with trusted parties).
--
I'll continue to listen to the signal [1], not the noise. What makes me happiest is that the people who deserve to win the most will win over the people who deserve it the least. It will be the greatest wealth transfer humanity has ever seen and it won't require any violence or coercion.
[1] https://twitter.com/LightningTipB0t/status/16150147987979919...
Both options and RSUs are required by law to have expiration dates. And it's plausible that either or both could have expiration dates within the next 12 months.
My company recently got bought by a privately owned company. Because of the ownership structure of the purchasing company we weren't allowed to exchange our options or let new ones vest so my company's board approved cancelling and reissuing everyone's options with an acceleration clause so they'd completely vest at completion so we'd all get a full payout. They did this because they knew if they didn't that there would be an exodus of employees before the purchase went through.
Employees represent a large % of the value of the company, if they all leave you just have a bunch of tech that no one else knows how to maintain or use. Institutional investors typically have such a large proportion of the shares that it's worth it to them to not just screw over employees because the employee sticking around and keeping shares is worth more than they'd save.
Especially since Stripe has steadfastly refused to go public so far...
Every single competent person would leave immediately and no employee would ever trust them again.
That's wildly off market, like 30%+. That's high, even for a retail platform.
Obviously the usual kind of market isn't applicable here, so I'm curious what you mean.
Seems like they now don't want to wait anymore and just unload their shares into the market and especially onto retail investors.
There are big downsides to being public, including all the regulatory requirements and pandering to institutional investors.
Now the bull market is over and private money is tighter, they don't really have a choice but to raise money publicly.
Coinbase on the other hand is very employee friendly in terms of liquidation. Their employees are rich as fuck with direct listing (no lockup) at the height of the market.
Just think about it.
Coinbase, who is ridiculed for being apolitical, treats employees better than Stripe.
Stripe is equally relevant.
It may not achieve the same private market valuation of $95B for some time. But we love the company, and will continue to use it as a partner, customer, and cheer leader.