There's a particular kind of pressure that builds inside a maturing startup. The board wants liquidity. Employees want to cash in their options. Investors want their exit. The cultural narrative screams that going public is the ultimate validation, the final boss level of entrepreneurship. And yet, I'd argue that the smartest founders right now should be doing something deeply unfashionable: saying no.
The unpopular take is that restraint, not speed, may be the smarter strategy here.
We've watched enough IPO cycles to know the pattern. A company hits a valuation milestone, the bankers circle, and suddenly there's this sense of inevitability. The window is open now. Strike while momentum exists. Wait too long and maybe the market shifts. Maybe investors lose interest. Maybe a competitor goes public first and sets the narrative.
But this reasoning conflates speed with opportunity. They're not the same thing.
Consider what actually happens when a company goes public before it's truly ready. The quarterly earnings treadmill begins immediately. Short-term stock performance becomes the organizing principle of decision-making. Long-term product bets get deprioritized. Risky innovation gets shelved because the market punishes volatility. You've solved for growth at scale, but now you're trapped optimizing for consistency instead.
More importantly, you've surrendered control at a moment when the stakes are highest. Private companies can afford to be weird. They can take losses on experimental products. They can ignore analysts who don't understand their vision. Public companies answer to shareholders who demand quarterly proof that the vision still makes financial sense.
There's also the matter of timing within market cycles. We're in a peculiar moment where several macro forces are simultaneously uncertain: regulatory pressure on tech is intensifying, interest rates create volatility in growth stock valuations, and investor patience for "story stocks" without near-term profitability has genuinely thinned. None of this means IPOs should stop happening. It means the companies going public right now need to demonstrate something more concrete than momentum.
Some of the most valuable private companies in history became that way because they stayed private longer than seemed rational. They built moats. They proved sustainable unit economics. They became genuinely difficult to disrupt rather than just fast-growing. When they finally went public, they went public from a position of such strength that the public markets simply had to accommodate them.
The founders I'd be watching right now are the ones who've already turned down IPO conversations. Not because they don't want to go public eventually, but because they've calculated that going public in the next 12-24 months would be optimizing for the wrong metric.
This perspective is genuinely unpopular in venture capital circles, where the liquidity event is the whole point. But founders should remember that their incentives and investor incentives aren't always perfectly aligned. Going public serves investors. Going public on your own terms, when your company is undeniably strong, serves everyone, including the public shareholders who will eventually own part of your company.
The IPO market will still be there in two years. But the chance to build something truly defensible might not be.