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If AirBnB hypothetically decided to never IPO, what incentives does an investor have in investing? Does the private AirBnB need to issue dividends? Genuinely cu

• nostrademons 11y ago
  Sell to a later investor in a private financing round. A number of these late-stage rounds include cash-out provisions that apply to early investors as well as founders and employees. The financial industry has basically taken the public markets private. There's nothing that says that all stock markets must be public, and in fact the history of stock exchanges has several instances of this in the past. The NYSE started out as a direct agreement between 24 brokers in 1792; it was regulated in 1817 to prevent abusive trading, and then grew dramatically in the mid 1800s with the invention of the electric telegraph. By 1865, a number of brokers were getting fed up with regulation, and so they established what became American Stock Exchange by trading stocks on the curb outside the NYSE. It was regulated in 1908. I predict that we're witnessing the birth of another stock market, or maybe it's already been born and I'm not enough of a cool kid to know about it.
  • zodiac 11y ago
    > Sell to a later investor in a private financing round. But what incentives would those later investors have? Public company stock is valuable because it provides the owner a dividend stream, control of the company as well as ownership of the company's assets; I wonder how an AirBnB, for example, that never went public would provide value to shareholders.