7 ms·

Microsoft's 1986 IPO

umeshunni 2y ago
Something I find interesting about early technology IPOs is how early they IPO-ed compared to more recent tech companies and how much of their growth and value creation happened post-IPO. - Microsoft IPOed in 11years, profitable and at a ~$800M valuation. They hit a ~$1T valuation in 2000. During the 90s, their stock roughly doubled each year, for a 1000x growth. - Amazon IPOed in ~3 years, unprofitable and at ~$300M valuation. Their stock has 2200x since then. - Google IPOed in ~6 years, proftiable and at a $25B valuation. Their stock has ~80x since then. - Facebook IPOed in ~8 years, profitable and at $100B valuation. Their stock has 20x since then. I think the ZIRP era led many companies to avoid going public, either because of access to easy money or because their financial didn't need to be disciplined enough. The high levels of pre-IPO funding also has led to many/most of them underperforming in the public markets.
- pdq 2y ago
  A16Z had an article on the lack of IPOs: https://a16z.com/where-have-all-the-ipos-gone/ https://a16z.com/where-have-all-the-ipos-gone/ Regulatory compliance like Sarbanes Oxley is another huge factor. And VC's having large capital pools make it easy for companies to stay private vastly longer without needing to raise funding from the public. It's very unfortunate for the public markets, as basic only VC's and PE get access to high growth young companies. Now most of the growth is squeezed out by the VC's and the public gets just the tail end of mature companies.
  - justahuman74 2y ago
    I'm suprised the VCs aren't pushing IPOs more. A lack of IPOs makes the startup life much less attractive than sitting around at a post-IPO company, which also means a harder time growing the startups the VCs are investing in
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      If you look right here on HN you will see how many gullible people think there equity will be statistically worth something. You would be surprised how many true believers there are out there
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > suprised the VCs aren't pushing IPOs more Harder to charge 2 & 20 on public equities.
      - justahuman74 2y ago
        I hadn't considered their fee structure. I guess it also likely not helpful to the VCs to have the public market having real opinions about the valuation that the fees are presumably based on, unless the company is a clear runaway success
  - ripped_britches 2y ago
    To be fair, 10-15% of VC money is from pension funds, so there is some indirect participation from the general public
- gabrielsroka 2y ago
  Apple was the first company to reach a $1 trillion market capitalization, achieving this milestone in August 2018. Microsoft reached a valuation of $1 trillion on April 25, 2019.
  - umeshunni 2y ago
    You're right. On Dec. 27, 1999, Microsoft's market cap hit hit $614 billion. I might have confused it with some "inflation adjusted market cap" I read somewhere.
    - jodrellblank 2y ago
      That’s 1.175 trillion in today’s dollars according to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
- thwarted 2y ago
  > Something I find interesting about early technology IPOs is how early they IPO-ed compared to more recent tech companies I am unable to resolve this sentence with the list that follows that has Microsoft IPOing significantly later in their life than the three others listed. Microsoft IPO'ed later compared to Amazon, Google, and Facebook.
  - jbs789 2y ago
    I think it’s not explicitly stated but consider the companies that have not IPOd and getting funding privately - I think that was his point.
  - pests 2y ago
    They mean that list compared to companies today.
- canucker2016 2y ago
  Apple (AAPL) dropped down to $0.12 in Dec 1997. 27 years later, stock price hit its high of $260.10 in 2024 Dec. 2167x. That's a mighty impressive run by Steve Jobs and Tim Cook.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    Yeah but that was their worst moment. Michael Dell joked someone should buy Apple for a few bucks and put them out of their misery. Of course history went another way but it was pretty close. And really, Steve Jobs wouldn't have been the leader he was without NeXT and Pixar. It was unfair how he got fired by Pepsi guy (Edit: That was John Sculley, I had forgotten his name) but he wasn't ready to lead Apple the size it was at that time. Things just came together at just the right moment.
    - cheema33 2y ago
      I have occasionally wondered about that. If Steve Jobs did not get fired by Sculley, would we still have the Apple we do today. I lean towards unlikely. I do think Steve had some growing up to do.
  - joezydeco 2y ago
    I still hold the theory that the entire success of Apple post-1997 hinged on iTunes for Windows. iMac and iPod were good products but iPod was stumbling along as a Mac-only product. Letting PC users use iPods opened the cash floodgates and let the iPhone get developed.
- jbs789 2y ago
  Yup. Strikes me as obvious that folks figured out how to get in there earlier rather than leave it to the public markets. Just sort of speaks to a combination of market efficiency plus increased regulation in my mind.
- yieldcrv 2y ago
  Most of people's issues with the Securities Exchange Commission came from changes in corporate behavior that made people notice they had an issue with the Securities Exchange Commission the SEC's class dividing rules were ignorable when companies were IPOing at low marketcaps people don't want to only buy companies after all the growth is seemingly done at 50bn-100bn+ marketcaps, while not having access to private markets or low liquidity in private markets so they pursue things outside of the SEC's protection
- vessenes 2y ago
  There’s some market/observer bias in these numbers; they hit four very different eras of VC and public markets perspectives on tech stocks. VCs in the Microsoft IPO era would proudly display a tombstone for a $50mm IPO raise. It was a very different time. Google was the first tech company to really test the bounds and power of Investment banks in the IPO process — they went with some sort of auction type mechanism (if I recall correctly), intended to keep bankers from making “too much” on the IPO, and were roundly snubbed by the sell side arms of those same bankers, resulting in a very low flotation. Which worked out fine for them. By the time Zuck IPOed, he had enough power and we had enough tech history that he was able to run a MAJOR IPO and retain complete control of the company. And, from a financial perspective, very well deserved. In each of these four eras, the perceived (and actual I guess) size of the addressable market for a tech company was roughly an order of magnitude larger than the prior, and combined with wealthier VCs from prior rounds, and more pattern recognition about business models, we see more of the value being captured early, out of the public markets.
raesene9 2y ago
Interesting article but I'm not sure some of the statements chime with how things looked at the time (IME ofc). I got involved in IT as a profession in 1995 and even then Lotus 1-2-3 and Wordperfect were going pretty well, so the idea stated in the article that :- "a monopoly in operating systems and office suites was inevitable before 1990 was over." seems a little overdone. My memory of what really tipped it for Microsoft in the office suite market (at least in the UK) was that they started giving away a full office suite with every new PC. So even though competitors might have better functionality, it was a tough sell to get past the price of "free". Definitely in the SMEs I worked in this was the reason that Office became the defacto option for office applications.
- jimt1234 2y ago
  I started my career in '95, too, and yeah, as difficult as it is to believe now, Microsoft's monopoly wasn't yet assured. The OS market was pretty much locked up (OS/2 Warp???), but as I recall, Wordperfect was the big obstacle in the office-suite space. It had a massive userbase, especially in markets that were not friendly to change (law offices). IMHO, the big boost for Microsoft was when they adopted the Lotus 1-2-3 and Wordperfect file formats. Now there was a product that costs less (free, with a new PC), and was compatible with all the existing docs/data. Game over.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    1995 was the tipping point. Windows 95 came out and WordPerfect was late coming up with a good Windows app.
    - thr0w 2y ago
      In my memory (was young at the time), 95 coming out was such a huge event. Something about its emphasis on multimedia experience really changed the whole feel of the PC, at least for me. 3.1 was like this arcane puzzle, but 95 felt personable.
      - 2y ago
aabajian 2y ago
People play up Bill Gates’ connections, sure, but next to no 16-year-olds could program BASIC in assembly. Microsoft’s success was as much to do with them being a programming languages company first. DOS, Windows 3.1, and even Windows 95 shipped with an interpreter and compiler for their BASIC and C, respectively. This empowered developers to use and write code for the OS out-of-the-box.
- nine_k 2y ago
  Correct regarding the BASIC. MS DOS (and even MSX BASIC and MSX DOS) was pretty important though in the grand scheme of the ecosystem forming. But neither Windows nor DOS shipped with a C compiler; it's not a Unix. DOS shipped with an IDE for BASIC, and compilers were available but not free. The more accessible option was Turbo Pascal (and then Delphi 1), Visual Basic was also popular but more costly. GCC appeared in 1987 but only worked acceptably under Unix-like OSes.
- bluedino 2y ago
  Microsoft shipped OSes with a crappy version of BASIC. But every computer did, before the PC came out.
  - bogantech 2y ago
    The BASIC interpreter on most of those other computers was written by Microsoft
- LtWorf 2y ago
  Windows didn't come with any C compiler out of the box. And no basic either. Where did you get this idea? Also qbasic was not the same as quickbasic, and it had a limit on the LOC and other limitations.
  - unregistereddev 2y ago
    Windows 95 and 98 came with QBasic, but it was not installed by default. It was an optional "extra feature" that could be added from your Windows installation media. I do not know about earlier versions of Windows.
ijidak 2y ago
Microsoft's IPO did not lead to the dotcom bubble. It was Netscape's IPO that did that. Microsoft and Intel's stocks were a big deal in the 90's. But they were solid businesses. To my memory, the idea of getting rich overnight simply by being tied to the Internet started with the Netscape IPO.
- vessenes 2y ago
  Yep. Michael Lewis’s book The New New Thing is a great little window into that timeframe. He claims Jim Clark really wanted a new boat, so Clark forced the IPO on the board to get some liquidity. Another major moment marking a ‘new market dynamic’ was Microsoft buying Hotmail in 1997 for roughly $400mm? Pretty much unheard of pricing for a web company.
Taniwha 2y ago
Before the dotcom boom there was a rule of thumb in the Valley: "in order to go public you have to have 5 consecutive quarters of profit" These days that's all gone out the window, but you can see why back then companies that did go public were more likely to succeed
doktorhladnjak 2y ago
> Today’s entrepreneurs would do well to note that Microsoft made minimal use of venture capital. Microsoft’s only VC only owned 6.2 percent of the company. Gates didn’t trust them. While the article touches on it here, Microsoft was able to avoid venture capital because it was highly profitable from its very early days. They turned their first profit in 1975, the same year they were founded. It seems like more companies spend longer amounts of time being unprofitable and growing. How much of that is a zero interest rate phenomenon or the new normal?
- foolfoolz 2y ago
  it was an outlier then and it’s an outlier now
  - frozenport 2y ago
    Indie dev turning profit first year is part of the typically success story for indie devs.
- Gud 2y ago
  Microsoft is also an outlier in having the CEOs and founders parent in the board of IBM who licensed Microsofts software.
  - wqaatwt 2y ago
    Didn’t they only get the IBM contract in 1980 (i.e. 5 years after the company was founded)?
    - Gud 2y ago
      Although that is true, my point is that Bill Gates had an extremely privileged upbringing. Bill Gates had access to advanced technologies in high school only 0.001% of other students would have. Bill Gates had direct access to people only 0.001% of his peers would(and I’m no doubt being generous to Bill Gates here). Bill Gates was a smart kid no doubt, but his environment accounts for most of his success.
yieldcrv 2y ago
Why doesn't this apply to Stripe with its 8,500 employees? > The reason Microsoft had to go public in 1986 was because Bill Gates had been using stock to attract talent. Microsoft projected that by sometime in 1987, they would have 500 shareholders, which would require Microsoft to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, effectively turning them into a publicly traded company, but without the benefits of going public in the conventional way. > Backed into this corner, Gates agreed in late 1985 to pursue an IPO.
- canucker2016 2y ago
  The rule was changed in 2012 according to articles on investopedia.com ( https://www.investopedia.com/terms/5/500-shareholder-threshold.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/5/500-shareholder-thresho... and https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/2000-investor-limit.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/2000-investor-limit.asp ) The limit has been raised to 2,000 shareholders. The company isn't required to go public, but the company does have to file its financial data with the SEC.
  - yieldcrv 2y ago
    Thats sort of what I thought, Do the rest of us get to see the financial information?
- jedberg 2y ago
  There are workarounds. Not sure if Stripe is using any of them, but the gist of it is to create subsidiaries that don't employ more than 2000 people (that's the current limit). So for example you'd have Stripe Engineering Inc., and Stripe Marketing Inc. and so on.
vessenes 2y ago
Some analysis here that I just don’t agree with. > [summarized] Amazon didn’t turn a profit until 2003 That was 100% by design. Why make profits when you can grow? Profits are taxed. Reinvesting in growth is generally not taxed, and you are rewarded by the market as it projects out how long your growth could continue and reflects that in your stock price. To be fair, the idea that you might buy a stock for something other than its likely dividend and that this wouldn’t just be a momentum trade is an idea that was finally cemented somewhere in the dotcom 1/dotcom 2 era. Still.
gist 2y ago
> Today’s entrepreneurs would do well to note that Microsoft made minimal use of venture capital. Microsoft’s only VC only owned 6.2 percent of the company. Gates didn’t trust them. > If you’re thinking of trying your hand at being the next Bill Gates, keep that in mind. Keep what in mind? Sure so try to build a company now w/o VC money and potentially complete with others who have taken that money? Microsoft obviously had an advantage of a completely new industry AND literaly very little VC money (and in vastly tighter amounts) funding competitors.
8f2ab37a-ed6c 2y ago
It’s interesting how much of the company Paul Allen owned at the time without being any longer involved with the company. I suspect that in 2025 he would have been bought out or pressured to return equity by that point

Something I find interesting about early technology IPOs is how early they IPO-ed compared to more recent tech companies and how much of their growth and value creation happened post-IPO. - Microsoft IPOed in 11years, profitable and at a ~$800M valuation. They hit a ~$1T valuation in 2000. During the 90s, their stock roughly doubled each year, for a 1000x growth. - Amazon IPOed in ~3 years, unprofitable and at ~$300M valuation. Their stock has 2200x since then. - Google IPOed in ~6 years, proftiable and at a $25B valuation. Their stock has ~80x since then. - Facebook IPOed in ~8 years, profitable and at $100B valuation. Their stock has 20x since then. I think the ZIRP era led many companies to avoid going public, either because of access to easy money or because their financial didn't need to be disciplined enough. The high levels of pre-IPO funding also has led to many/most of them underperforming in the public markets.

pdq 2y ago
A16Z had an article on the lack of IPOs: https://a16z.com/where-have-all-the-ipos-gone/ https://a16z.com/where-have-all-the-ipos-gone/ Regulatory compliance like Sarbanes Oxley is another huge factor. And VC's having large capital pools make it easy for companies to stay private vastly longer without needing to raise funding from the public. It's very unfortunate for the public markets, as basic only VC's and PE get access to high growth young companies. Now most of the growth is squeezed out by the VC's and the public gets just the tail end of mature companies.
- justahuman74 2y ago
  I'm suprised the VCs aren't pushing IPOs more. A lack of IPOs makes the startup life much less attractive than sitting around at a post-IPO company, which also means a harder time growing the startups the VCs are investing in
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    If you look right here on HN you will see how many gullible people think there equity will be statistically worth something. You would be surprised how many true believers there are out there
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > suprised the VCs aren't pushing IPOs more Harder to charge 2 & 20 on public equities.
    - justahuman74 2y ago
      I hadn't considered their fee structure. I guess it also likely not helpful to the VCs to have the public market having real opinions about the valuation that the fees are presumably based on, unless the company is a clear runaway success
- ripped_britches 2y ago
  To be fair, 10-15% of VC money is from pension funds, so there is some indirect participation from the general public
gabrielsroka 2y ago
Apple was the first company to reach a $1 trillion market capitalization, achieving this milestone in August 2018. Microsoft reached a valuation of $1 trillion on April 25, 2019.
- umeshunni 2y ago
  You're right. On Dec. 27, 1999, Microsoft's market cap hit hit $614 billion. I might have confused it with some "inflation adjusted market cap" I read somewhere.
  - jodrellblank 2y ago
    That’s 1.175 trillion in today’s dollars according to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
thwarted 2y ago
> Something I find interesting about early technology IPOs is how early they IPO-ed compared to more recent tech companies I am unable to resolve this sentence with the list that follows that has Microsoft IPOing significantly later in their life than the three others listed. Microsoft IPO'ed later compared to Amazon, Google, and Facebook.
- jbs789 2y ago
  I think it’s not explicitly stated but consider the companies that have not IPOd and getting funding privately - I think that was his point.
- pests 2y ago
  They mean that list compared to companies today.
canucker2016 2y ago
Apple (AAPL) dropped down to $0.12 in Dec 1997. 27 years later, stock price hit its high of $260.10 in 2024 Dec. 2167x. That's a mighty impressive run by Steve Jobs and Tim Cook.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Yeah but that was their worst moment. Michael Dell joked someone should buy Apple for a few bucks and put them out of their misery. Of course history went another way but it was pretty close. And really, Steve Jobs wouldn't have been the leader he was without NeXT and Pixar. It was unfair how he got fired by Pepsi guy (Edit: That was John Sculley, I had forgotten his name) but he wasn't ready to lead Apple the size it was at that time. Things just came together at just the right moment.
  - cheema33 2y ago
    I have occasionally wondered about that. If Steve Jobs did not get fired by Sculley, would we still have the Apple we do today. I lean towards unlikely. I do think Steve had some growing up to do.
- joezydeco 2y ago
  I still hold the theory that the entire success of Apple post-1997 hinged on iTunes for Windows. iMac and iPod were good products but iPod was stumbling along as a Mac-only product. Letting PC users use iPods opened the cash floodgates and let the iPhone get developed.
jbs789 2y ago
Yup. Strikes me as obvious that folks figured out how to get in there earlier rather than leave it to the public markets. Just sort of speaks to a combination of market efficiency plus increased regulation in my mind.
yieldcrv 2y ago
Most of people's issues with the Securities Exchange Commission came from changes in corporate behavior that made people notice they had an issue with the Securities Exchange Commission the SEC's class dividing rules were ignorable when companies were IPOing at low marketcaps people don't want to only buy companies after all the growth is seemingly done at 50bn-100bn+ marketcaps, while not having access to private markets or low liquidity in private markets so they pursue things outside of the SEC's protection
vessenes 2y ago
There’s some market/observer bias in these numbers; they hit four very different eras of VC and public markets perspectives on tech stocks. VCs in the Microsoft IPO era would proudly display a tombstone for a $50mm IPO raise. It was a very different time. Google was the first tech company to really test the bounds and power of Investment banks in the IPO process — they went with some sort of auction type mechanism (if I recall correctly), intended to keep bankers from making “too much” on the IPO, and were roundly snubbed by the sell side arms of those same bankers, resulting in a very low flotation. Which worked out fine for them. By the time Zuck IPOed, he had enough power and we had enough tech history that he was able to run a MAJOR IPO and retain complete control of the company. And, from a financial perspective, very well deserved. In each of these four eras, the perceived (and actual I guess) size of the addressable market for a tech company was roughly an order of magnitude larger than the prior, and combined with wealthier VCs from prior rounds, and more pattern recognition about business models, we see more of the value being captured early, out of the public markets.

raesene9 2y ago

Interesting article but I'm not sure some of the statements chime with how things looked at the time (IME ofc). I got involved in IT as a profession in 1995 and even then Lotus 1-2-3 and Wordperfect were going pretty well, so the idea stated in the article that :- "a monopoly in operating systems and office suites was inevitable before 1990 was over." seems a little overdone. My memory of what really tipped it for Microsoft in the office suite market (at least in the UK) was that they started giving away a full office suite with every new PC. So even though competitors might have better functionality, it was a tough sell to get past the price of "free". Definitely in the SMEs I worked in this was the reason that Office became the defacto option for office applications.

jimt1234 2y ago
I started my career in '95, too, and yeah, as difficult as it is to believe now, Microsoft's monopoly wasn't yet assured. The OS market was pretty much locked up (OS/2 Warp???), but as I recall, Wordperfect was the big obstacle in the office-suite space. It had a massive userbase, especially in markets that were not friendly to change (law offices). IMHO, the big boost for Microsoft was when they adopted the Lotus 1-2-3 and Wordperfect file formats. Now there was a product that costs less (free, with a new PC), and was compatible with all the existing docs/data. Game over.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  1995 was the tipping point. Windows 95 came out and WordPerfect was late coming up with a good Windows app.
  - thr0w 2y ago
    In my memory (was young at the time), 95 coming out was such a huge event. Something about its emphasis on multimedia experience really changed the whole feel of the PC, at least for me. 3.1 was like this arcane puzzle, but 95 felt personable.
    - 2y ago

aabajian 2y ago

People play up Bill Gates’ connections, sure, but next to no 16-year-olds could program BASIC in assembly. Microsoft’s success was as much to do with them being a programming languages company first. DOS, Windows 3.1, and even Windows 95 shipped with an interpreter and compiler for their BASIC and C, respectively. This empowered developers to use and write code for the OS out-of-the-box.

nine_k 2y ago
Correct regarding the BASIC. MS DOS (and even MSX BASIC and MSX DOS) was pretty important though in the grand scheme of the ecosystem forming. But neither Windows nor DOS shipped with a C compiler; it's not a Unix. DOS shipped with an IDE for BASIC, and compilers were available but not free. The more accessible option was Turbo Pascal (and then Delphi 1), Visual Basic was also popular but more costly. GCC appeared in 1987 but only worked acceptably under Unix-like OSes.
bluedino 2y ago
Microsoft shipped OSes with a crappy version of BASIC. But every computer did, before the PC came out.
- bogantech 2y ago
  The BASIC interpreter on most of those other computers was written by Microsoft
LtWorf 2y ago
Windows didn't come with any C compiler out of the box. And no basic either. Where did you get this idea? Also qbasic was not the same as quickbasic, and it had a limit on the LOC and other limitations.
- unregistereddev 2y ago
  Windows 95 and 98 came with QBasic, but it was not installed by default. It was an optional "extra feature" that could be added from your Windows installation media. I do not know about earlier versions of Windows.

ijidak 2y ago

Microsoft's IPO did not lead to the dotcom bubble. It was Netscape's IPO that did that. Microsoft and Intel's stocks were a big deal in the 90's. But they were solid businesses. To my memory, the idea of getting rich overnight simply by being tied to the Internet started with the Netscape IPO.

vessenes 2y ago
Yep. Michael Lewis’s book The New New Thing is a great little window into that timeframe. He claims Jim Clark really wanted a new boat, so Clark forced the IPO on the board to get some liquidity. Another major moment marking a ‘new market dynamic’ was Microsoft buying Hotmail in 1997 for roughly $400mm? Pretty much unheard of pricing for a web company.

Taniwha 2y ago

Before the dotcom boom there was a rule of thumb in the Valley: "in order to go public you have to have 5 consecutive quarters of profit" These days that's all gone out the window, but you can see why back then companies that did go public were more likely to succeed

doktorhladnjak 2y ago

> Today’s entrepreneurs would do well to note that Microsoft made minimal use of venture capital. Microsoft’s only VC only owned 6.2 percent of the company. Gates didn’t trust them. While the article touches on it here, Microsoft was able to avoid venture capital because it was highly profitable from its very early days. They turned their first profit in 1975, the same year they were founded. It seems like more companies spend longer amounts of time being unprofitable and growing. How much of that is a zero interest rate phenomenon or the new normal?

foolfoolz 2y ago
it was an outlier then and it’s an outlier now
- frozenport 2y ago
  Indie dev turning profit first year is part of the typically success story for indie devs.
Gud 2y ago
Microsoft is also an outlier in having the CEOs and founders parent in the board of IBM who licensed Microsofts software.
- wqaatwt 2y ago
  Didn’t they only get the IBM contract in 1980 (i.e. 5 years after the company was founded)?
  - Gud 2y ago
    Although that is true, my point is that Bill Gates had an extremely privileged upbringing. Bill Gates had access to advanced technologies in high school only 0.001% of other students would have. Bill Gates had direct access to people only 0.001% of his peers would(and I’m no doubt being generous to Bill Gates here). Bill Gates was a smart kid no doubt, but his environment accounts for most of his success.

yieldcrv 2y ago

Why doesn't this apply to Stripe with its 8,500 employees? > The reason Microsoft had to go public in 1986 was because Bill Gates had been using stock to attract talent. Microsoft projected that by sometime in 1987, they would have 500 shareholders, which would require Microsoft to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, effectively turning them into a publicly traded company, but without the benefits of going public in the conventional way. > Backed into this corner, Gates agreed in late 1985 to pursue an IPO.

canucker2016 2y ago
The rule was changed in 2012 according to articles on investopedia.com ( https://www.investopedia.com/terms/5/500-shareholder-threshold.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/5/500-shareholder-thresho... and https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/2000-investor-limit.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/2000-investor-limit.asp ) The limit has been raised to 2,000 shareholders. The company isn't required to go public, but the company does have to file its financial data with the SEC.
- yieldcrv 2y ago
  Thats sort of what I thought, Do the rest of us get to see the financial information?
jedberg 2y ago
There are workarounds. Not sure if Stripe is using any of them, but the gist of it is to create subsidiaries that don't employ more than 2000 people (that's the current limit). So for example you'd have Stripe Engineering Inc., and Stripe Marketing Inc. and so on.

vessenes 2y ago

Some analysis here that I just don’t agree with. > [summarized] Amazon didn’t turn a profit until 2003 That was 100% by design. Why make profits when you can grow? Profits are taxed. Reinvesting in growth is generally not taxed, and you are rewarded by the market as it projects out how long your growth could continue and reflects that in your stock price. To be fair, the idea that you might buy a stock for something other than its likely dividend and that this wouldn’t just be a momentum trade is an idea that was finally cemented somewhere in the dotcom 1/dotcom 2 era. Still.

gist 2y ago

> Today’s entrepreneurs would do well to note that Microsoft made minimal use of venture capital. Microsoft’s only VC only owned 6.2 percent of the company. Gates didn’t trust them. > If you’re thinking of trying your hand at being the next Bill Gates, keep that in mind. Keep what in mind? Sure so try to build a company now w/o VC money and potentially complete with others who have taken that money? Microsoft obviously had an advantage of a completely new industry AND literaly very little VC money (and in vastly tighter amounts) funding competitors.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 2y ago

It’s interesting how much of the company Paul Allen owned at the time without being any longer involved with the company. I suspect that in 2025 he would have been bought out or pressured to return equity by that point