Other then cashing in equity has anyone found that a IPO has made a place better or worse for the employees?
Big fan of Hashicorp products btw
Within a few years post IPO the Composition of the company will have totally changed. The special place becomes a regular corporation. The hyenas will try to move on to the next Prize.
Say you joined a company relatively early. If you're still around years later by an IPO, you probably liked that early environment where you had low-to-no management overhead, large direct impact, and everybody was personally invested in getting shit done. For most employees that environment was already slipping away pre-IPO, but you know you're close to the finish line and can't get off now. What remains is quickly going to be gone post-IPO.
The early employees get major cash-outs; some probably don't need to work at all anymore, so those that treat their job as a means-to-an-end and not their identity leave immediately. Maybe there's big incentives to stay for a few years, paid out annually, hung over your head so you don't quit immediately. But after a year of more managers and TPS reports and public company corporate governance you get your payout... That annual bonus structure practically forces you to decide if you want to leave now, or signup for a whole 'nother year of this, so a wave of people leave. After a 2nd year of this they're mostly gone to greener pastures.
Less-early employees still get significant cash-outs in a large event like this. Maybe they use it to take some time off, it's been a long few years. Once you're out for a while, why not look at what else is out there on the market. Some of them find out they liked this new big-company stuff and want more of it, so they'll probably stay for years. Others are like the early employees and want the good-old days back, they have to go find it somewhere else.
But you're 2 months away from an early RSU grant from vesting you a few hundred thousands dollars on top of the ISO's you haven't cashed out yet. But eventually the right opportunity comes your way and everyone is shocked you're leaving like you were when a legendary person left 6 months earlier. You take a pay cut and probably worse benefits and more ISO's than you could imagine to join that series a or b startup you connected with as soulmates and it's going to be OK.
There is: don't go public or issue stocks. In Germany, we are famous for non-public companies: the "Mittelstand" is largely owned by the founders or their descendants, which frees them from a lot of external influences - for better (companies can focus on long term goals instead of phony quarterly/activist investor-driven "KPI/OKR" goals, companies save on a lot of the bureaucracy that the law mandates for public/share-issuing companies) or worse (we're notorious for a lack of digitalization and progress as well as inheritance squabbles).
An example are the retail chains ALDI and LIDL or manufacturers Bosch and Heraeus - all tens to hundreds of thousands of employees and many billions of net worth, but it's rare to even find somewhat reliable numbers on them.
Those systems and processes are critical to staying out of trouble with the law after going public.
Someone wrote, perhaps Tom DiMarco: “a process is per definition not agile”.
Too many processes are never automated, and people are assigned to manually enforce and follow up on processes, that should be completely automatic.
This is where process busywork creates yet further busywork. Prime example? ITIL (as this is an IT focused site many probably have heard of it).
If you don’t automate the heck out of ITIL you reduces quality, slow any pace down and the mess remains.
On the flip side of the same coin, the ability to offer liquid equity and essentially pay employees using the company's projected growth (RSU issuance) is often financially lucrative for employees old and new and if done correctly, can attract a different group of really strong people who aren't in a place to take the startup gamble.
We had an all-night hackathon the night before (one of the hacks was to wire into the "Nasdaq bell" button to post an opengraph story) and the whole company was mostly in a "stay focused and keep shipping" mode.
The leadership team shared a few funny jokes each week at the all-hands events leading up to it talking about the roadshow but prep work for the IPO was mostly framed as "this thing we've got to do" and not as some kind of goal. The company was overwhelming focused on the work at hand.
Overall the IPO was cool and I'm sure for many momentus, but as a somewhat newly acquired employee it was mostly a non-event and no one made me feel like I'd missed out by not joining earlier. Everyone was really just starting to feel comfortable at the newish physical HQ and morale was generally high. Most if not all the internal chatter was around the idea that "this journey is 1% finished" and at least everyone I knew there was in "let's do this and move on" mode.
Mark had publicly committed to not selling any shares for at least a year so no one thought he was going to bail or anything.
The stock price then proceeded to fall from $30's to the $10's and despite the on-paper financial hit for many of us it was kind of validating that "those silly people in wallstreet still don't get it" and that we weren't at the end of anything, we were still at the beginning.
As FB then consistently grew for the next 9 years to nearly $400/share there was still plenty of upside so there wasn't much of a pre-IPO vs. post-IPO tribal thing going on either.
In short, the culture was never built around "let's get this thing to IPO" so it wasn't really impacted negatively by reaching that milestone.