The tech industry has been abuzz with initial public offerings as of late, with Snap and MuleSoft recently going public to great fanfare and varying degrees of success. But not all companies in Silicon Valley are chomping at the bit to begin transactions on Wall Street, one of which is already in the business of helping its customers make transactions every day. Stripe is a San Francisco-based payments company that has a $9.2 billion valuation. And Patrick Collison, the CEO of the seven-year-old firm said, there are no plans for an IPO in the near future.
As initially reported by TechCrunch, Collison said at the Launch conference in San Francisco this weekend that the company does not plan on going public any time soon. Using Amazon as an example, Collison recalled struggles that many tech companies have had upon first going public.
“If you look at the Amazon daily history [as a public company], they had an incredibly turbulent time for their first couple of years,” he told Launch founder Jason Calacanis in an interview. “Now in 2017 … it all looks great. But they had a tough time at the beginning and I think this is a broader structural challenge across the industry.”
Collison also pointed out that an IPO could make it more difficult for a company like Stripe to take calculated risks and moving at its own pace.
“Being a public company certainly doesn’t stop you from taking a really long-term time horizon, but it does make it more difficult,” he said. “From our standpoint, becoming a public company makes sense when you’ve reached some point of stability, some plateau — [when] you’ve done the stuff that you at least initially set out to. And we haven’t. We’re still very early in this trajectory that we first established. And because we work with startups, they themselves have lengthy trajectories, so this is just going to have to be — when you’re building infrastructure — long time horizons are involved.”
