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.

Our IPO was the most successful of 2019. The stock tripled on day one. For one moment, everyone believed plant-based meat was the future.

Going public was not the finish line. It was the starting line for the next chapter.

The IPO was supposed to be a celebration. The stock dropped 27 percent on day one. Markets have a way of humbling you.

The SPAC was supposed to be a celebration. The stock dropped 80 percent. Markets are a brutal judge of profitability.

Going from a $1.1 billion private valuation to a $575 million IPO teaches you that Wall Street has a different calculator.

Our IPO was the worst first day in London Stock Exchange history. We're still here. That tells you something about resilience.

Going public gave us access to capital that most robotics startups can only dream about. We need it. Robots are expensive.

Intel paid $15.3 billion for us, then IPO'd us at $17 billion. Not a bad trade for either side.

The NASDAQ bell was for every Indian engineer who was told they could only build services companies, not product companies.

Being pregnant at my IPO was not a statement. It was just Tuesday.

Profitability before IPO is not conservative. It is respectful. It means you are not asking public investors to fund your experiments.

The Casablanca Stock Exchange listing was the proof that Moroccan investors believed in what we were building for Moroccan families.

Going public would mean answering to people who do not understand what we are building. That is not a trade I want to make.

I feel this IPO price optimisation is a silly exercise and I keep telling founders, what's your gain in this? You're the one holding the bag.