Picture a gifted machine-learning engineer with two offers in hand, holding the quality of the job constant. The salaries are the same. One firm pays most of the pay in stock she can look up on her phone and sell the day it vests. The other pays in shares nobody will price for her, or in the promise of a partnership a decade away. Which one does she take? The ticker, every time.
A stock price does two things for employees that nothing else can. It gives them liquidity: their wealth is real money they can spend, or borrow against. And, in markets like today’s, it gives them the froth: a currency that investors price generously, often more generously than the business underneath deserves.
My point is simple. Without a stock price, and therefore without liquidity and without the lift of public-market valuations, private firms will find it all but impossible to attract and keep talent that can go elsewhere and get one.
Paper wealth isn’t wealth
Equity is the currency of ambition. A gifted 28-year-old can earn a good salary almost anywhere. What separates one offer from another is the upside. But upside you can’t value, can’t sell, can’t borrow against and can’t diversify is a lottery ticket with a vesting schedule.
OpenAI is a case in point. In August it spent about $7 billion of its own cash buying shares back from current and former employees at an $852 billion valuation. That followed a $6.6 billion employee share sale the previous October. In between, it confidentially filed for an IPO. When an AI lab locked in an arms race for researchers spends $7 billion so its people can cash out, that is not a perk. It’s a retention budget.
Eleven months in the dark
Here’s the catch with a tender offer: it happens infrequently every year. In between, employees are flying blind.
Stripe’s own people know the feeling. In 2024, Stripe told employees to expect a chance to sell shares about once a year, and many had assumed that chance would finally come as an IPO. It didn’t. As one observer noted at the time, long-time employees still sitting on paper shares had watched the liquidity event of a lifetime come and go, and could hardly be happy about it.
The result is a quiet, constant anxiety: is my net worth still there, and how much of it? Paper wealth with no price is not financial security. And a competitor offering liquid stock, priced every second of every trading day, can pull your best person away with one phone call. Stripe does not seem to have a clear intention of going public. Failing such an intention, employees migrate to greener pastures.
