Write me a script for an upcoming All Hands meeting about our IPO prospects and how employees need to act in the quiet period.


Answer: Lately, I've received plenty of questions about a potential IPO. I want to answer those questions today — and talk about how we as a company will answer questions like that moving forward.

For years, we’ve shared that one of our aspirations is to build a wildly successful public company. Everyone has a role to play in getting us there and delivering for customers and growing the business is the most important thing most of us can do.

A typical milestone on a high-growth journey is an IPO. But as companies get more serious about a potential IPO, there is a period where they stop talking about an IPO.  This might be counter-intuitive, but here’s why: there are important regulatory restrictions on what companies can and cannot say when it comes to company growth and plans as they approach becoming a public company. The consequences if you don’t follow those rules can be serious — the SEC can even delay our ability to go public if it determines we’ve improperly promoted an IPO. And that’s obviously a situation we want to avoid, should we be in a position to go public in the future.  

And even language like this — "should we be in a position to go public in the future" — is vague. That's for a reason: as we get closer to an IPO, what we can say is restricted and we need to make sure we don’t make promises, otherwise regulators could force us to delay our plans.

So I’m going to share some updates about how we’ll need to communicate related to a potential IPO:

In order to preserve the ability to IPO at some point in the future, the executive team and I will not be sharing explicit details on our IPO journey or timing at All Hands or in other company communications. We also won’t be sharing updates to our market valuation. 

Hiring managers and recruiters should not explicitly talk about an IPO or our revenue growth with candidates. Instead, emphasize our massive opportunity, how we’re innovating, delivering value to our customers, and what an awesome team we have.  

We can’t engage with public market investors or financial journalists on certain topics. That means if a financial analyst, research analyst or reporter reaches out to you, don’t respond and forward the email to the communications team.

We also can’t talk about a potential IPO on social media or with friends and family. You get the idea.

I know that this will be different for us. We’ve always been a transparent company and this change is hopefully a short-term one. But it is an important one and you all have a role to play in helping us remain compliant.

We all have different, important roles to play in making this company a successful, long-term business. The most important thing we can all do is to continue delivering for our customers and building a successful business.