Companies Want To Stay Private

IPO. Initial public offering. Something you might have heard about. And it's totally fine if you haven't heard about it. Because this isn't something that gets thrown around everywhere. It is only used in the stock market. An IPO means a company is now open to the public to be traded by its stock, which represents a percentage of the company's ownership. A fun little example can be Figma. Figma went public a few months ago. And it is now a publicly traded company. You can simply head over to Wall Street and buy stock in this company. Which was not possible earlier. Because earlier the company was not publicly traded. It was private. Some of the biggest companies we know are private. Such as OpenAI, Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter etc. you cannot simply head over to Wall Street and buy their stocks. But you can buy the stocks of Nvidia or AMD or Intel or Apple or Google. ---  [Source](https://pixabay.com/photos/gamestop-stock-chart-gme-6286877/) --- Now why am I talking about this? I am talking about it because such publicly traded companies are shrinking in number every year. In other words, companies are not going public as frequently as they used to in the last century. This creates a lot of problems and I can go over there, but I guess I'll talk about them in a different post. Today we might discuss why this is happening. The most obvious reason is staying private helps you keep control of your company. Once you're public, you have to meet shareholder expectations. You'll have to meet the quarterly earnings report. You'll have to maintain a clean social image etc. You mess up any one of those or something like that and your company stock will tank. While they're private, you don't have to worry about any of that. So yeah, many people simply just do not want all that hassle and so they don't want to go public. Although one might argue. Going public opens up the company to a lot more funding. That is true but it is also true that nowadays there is a lot more money in the private sector. Enough to make companies reluctant to go public. Because all the money they need can be accumulated from the private funds. So as long as the money issue isn't involved, staying private is only obvious. You and I both will do it. Then comes the government scrutiny. The government imposed regulations regarding transparency and other things only apply to publicly traded companies. Private companies are not subject to these laws. So there is another reason why startups don't want to go over the hassle of all these regulations and earning calls and in turn, lose their identity to please the shareholders. There are so many reasons as to why companies don't go public like before. While all of them are valid reasons, it is creating a lot more inequality and a lot fewer chances for the average Joe to make it big. I will thoroughly discuss this situation someday in the near future.