What It’s Like to IPO | Stay SaaSy

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04 Jun 2026

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startups

What It’s Like to IPO

When baby sea turtles are born on the shore, they immediately rush by the thousand towards the ocean. Every predator in the area swarms to devour as many as they can. Only a few dozen make it to the water. An even smaller number make it to adulthood, and ultimately return to start the next generation.

Startups, like Mother Nature, are a brutal numbers game. This is what it’s like to become one of the few turtles that makes it back to the beach.

12 Years Before

You’re standing awkwardly in a one-room office. A guy in a T-shirt hands you a laptop, but tells you to factory reset it first. It belonged to a different engineer yesterday. The startup doesn’t have enough money for excess laptops. It’s 10am and there’s nobody else in the room.

He’s talking about how there’s a form to early-exercise your stock options, and you’ve got 30 days to mail a different form to the IRS, and do you have a check, and this is really important if there’s a “liquidity event” one day… you can already feel your eyes glazing over. You ask where you can grab a notepad and pen to take notes for the rest of onboarding. Laptop Guy stares at you blankly. This conversation is the entire onboarding, and there aren’t any notepads or pens, either. He says that if you need office supplies you can buy them at CVS and he’ll reimburse you.

“So, uh… what do you want your email address to be?”

6 Years Before

You go to Thanksgiving and tell your grandma the name of the startup, again. Your mom tries to describe what it does and gets it about 40% right. It doesn’t matter. Everyone’s moved onto discussing their fantasy football teams.

You were a smart teenager. You went to an amazing college, and your family was so proud. How did you wind up here? Your startup’s CI runs on a Mac Mini under your desk. It burns your legs. You have $0 in revenue. You’d think that this was rock bottom, but you’d be wrong. The startup used to have some revenue, but you churned it away, so now you’re back to $0. You’ve had 3 Heads of Sales in as many years – this at least does make sense, since they never seem to sell anything.

You have no idea whether more funding will land, but you can tell that you need it. Your best friend from high school just graduated med school. Pass the gravy.

12 Hours Before

The stock market has closed for the day, and the IPO is now inevitable. Aspects of the deal are still being discussed, the Book is being built, but there is nothing left that can disrupt it. You have spent weeks worrying about disasters that could have caused an issue in the markets and canceled the deal. It’s become a paranoid loop running in your head. But the big day has finally arrived and there aren’t enough hours left to fuck it up.

The adrenaline dump after a decade of white-knuckling the steering wheel is intense. You’ve worried about the company’s fortunes constantly, for years, and you can’t really turn it off, even on the eve of the IPO. You check your phone – same email address, same Slack handle that you picked in that office years ago. When the menus arrive for the celebration dinner you barely have the mental energy to order.

9 Hours Before

You’re looking at memorabilia that you’ve kept stuffed in a folder at home, relics from when the startup was tiny, seed stage. You opened up the printed (!) directory of an event from a decade ago. Techcrunch Disrupt. You remember it well – huge waterfront venue, full soundstage, two days of presentations, hundreds of booths, your team tucked in the back by the water coolers with the other fledgling startups. So much positive energy, so many excited faces, so many teams with such bright futures.

Based on a quick scan, your company is the only one that’s still in business. None of the other turtles made it home.

1 Hour Before

You arrive at the stock exchange to an extensive corporate buffet. It’s a huge reunion with people flying in from across the world. You haven’t seen some of them in-person in years. You’ve never seen any of them in a suit this early in the morning.

The CEO, founders, and early execs are celebrities. A Director who joined 8 months ago comes up to you – this is their chance to meet in person. “Did you expect this day would come?” Dude. That’s like asking if I expected to get hit by a meteor.

10 Minutes Before

You’re in a sterile, brightly lit holding pen. The exchange has sent in what can only be described as a corporate hype-man to get everyone fired up before the big moment.

The experience of having this high-budget camp counselor run a 5 minute pump-up exercise is utterly bizarre. For you, this is the most important day of your career. Your grandparents fled their home countries under literal gunfire to help you get here, to America, to the center of the capitalist universe. Today is a crowning moment in that saga. For Gary the hype-man, it is Tuesday.

5 Minutes...