[jwegan]

A direct listing is definitely not the most likely option. Only two major tech companies have done direct listings and there are also a lot more reasons you would want to do an IPO instead of a direct listing

1) Neither SPOT or WORK has done great, especially WORK

2) IPO allows you to choose your investors. This gives you the opportunity to choose major institutional investors that are in for the long term which will help reduce stock volatility.

3) Even if you don't need money, raising billions can open up a lot of opportunities for the business and give you a warchest to derisk potential market downturns.

[mrgordon]

Here is an article from Reuters today that emphasizes that most people expect a direct listing:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-airbnb-ipo/airbnb-plans-p...

“In a short statement posted on its website on Thursday, Airbnb did not give any details on how it plans to list its shares, although it is widely expected to take a direct-listing route.”

[mrgordon]

A direct listing is definitely the most likely option which is why they didn’t call it an IPO anywhere. They already have huge numbers of institutional and strategic investors. I’m not sure who you think they are waiting to get investment from. Crunchbase lists 53 investors including YC, Sequoia, Andreesen Horowitz, Greylock, Founder’s Fund, CapitalG, and TCV. They turned down SoftBank funding. Their shares have been owned by mutual funds from Vanguard, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, Principal, T. Rowe Price, and Hartford for at least five years. They’ve already raised the warchest that you’re talking about.

Spotify and Slack had fine initial listings, but they are both losing tons of money so the market reacted negatively as their quarterly earnings made this more and more clear. Not a great comparison to a company that has been printing money and hasn’t raised a serious round in years.