IPO

SoftBank put in $3 billion. Everyone said Masa Son was crazy. Then we went public at $84 billion and suddenly he looked like a genius again. That's how Masa works.

We went public via SPAC in 2021. People called SPACs a scam. Our stock dropped 80%. Then we posted five straight profitable quarters and the stock 10x'd. Execution beats narrative.

We went public at a $15 billion valuation. For a card issuing company. If you told VCs in 2010 that card infrastructure would be worth $15 billion, they would have laughed you out of the room. I know because they did.

We went public on NASDAQ at $6.8 billion. An Israeli company, built in Tel Aviv, with a name based on the worst day of the week. The irony writes itself.

We raised $82.5 million in our IPO. Nine months later we shut down. From IPO to liquidation in nine months. That has to be some kind of record.

We filed for an IPO. A fintech company from India, founded in 1998, going public after 25 years. Not every startup story is a two-year blitz. Some take a quarter century.

We went public at a $7 billion valuation. Then Naver bought us for $1.2 billion. That math hurts. But the company needed a global platform, and Naver had Asia. Sometimes selling is the right move even at a discount.

We went public in 2024 at a $6 billion valuation. For a precision medicine company. Not a drug company — a data company that helps doctors choose the right drug. That's a new category.

Going public was not the finish line. It was permission to think in decades instead of quarters.