Who cares about the narrative unless you need to raise capital again soon? The money you get in an IPO actually goes into the business, while the trading price of the stock has no impact on the business.
An individual company is not part of an iterative game but the underwriters and institutional investors are, and it creates misaligned incentives.
It’s the reason for the hype around direct listings. So far no one has raised money that way but it’s only a matter of time. The difference is between floating publicly and floating publicly with a raise is basically nothing.
Say, I join a public company. If they say they will pay me 500k USD worth of stocks, it generally means that I get 500k/(average share price of month, share price on stock offer date etc.) stocks subject to vesting cycle. Basically, I have fixed number of shares from that point and they appreciate or depreciate with the market.
I am assuming if AirBnB offered 500k USD of RSUs similarly and the RSU price was say 50. That means the person had 10k RSUs subject to vesting cycle. So, if the stock price is 120 now they have 1200k USD worth of stocks subject to vesting cycle.