And for every one you've heard of, there are IPOs you've not heard of, acquisitions, etc.
You might not get rich, but there are plenty of folks out there who have made a few hundred thousand in a small company IPO, or an extra $50k for 6 months of work, or whatever.
My situation is far more common than the people making millions from unicorns at IPO.
The majority of exits don't come from IPOs. They come from acquisitions of small-ish companies by big or medium size companies. These don't make headlines because they're not very noteworthy for the average person.
True, but you could make good money as well by having access to all IPO-s. I did the math a while back and selling the first day you could average around 10%, which is nothing to sneeze at.
There's a lot of fuck up IPOs then. I know I got double my money pretty quick on the VMWare IPO and the Visa IPO, just buying as soon as they went public and selling at a peak after news.
I'd start by reading "The Millionaire Next Door." It basically boils down to 1) get a decent paying job, 2) live below your means, 3) save/invest the rest of your money for 20 to 30+ years.
Hitting 3 "about-to-IPO" companies that actually do IPO and also give you a decent return is very, very low probability. One of the first startups I worked for, during the dot-bom boom, went IPO. Less than two year later it was near bankruptcy. Everyone's options were under water. Maybe a couple guys cashed out a bit, but nothing life changing.
With a seemingly endless stream of stock wealth, those recent IPOs don't even cross my radar, frankly. I don't have the impression that there are more IPOs recently than there had been over the past decade, but maybe I'm wrong.
Selling the company: that's not a rare event. An IPO: that's like becoming an actor with the intent of being the next Tom Cruise. There are many, many buyers out there, hardly just Google. If you make something that people need (not merely what they think they want, but what they need) then you will be able to sell.
Not surprising, most IPOs that have come to the market in the last few years are startups that have long since been anything but, and have all their value already extracted, and then the IPO happens to see how many broader investors they can rip off.
If you witnessed the pains of growing a company to IPO level and been aware of the solutions applied in order to ease this pain and make the transition smoother, then you are very valuable for small companies that face the similar issues. For them, you are a "bar raiser".
A lot of the recent IPOs are pretty big, and while I don’t have insider info I assume at least the early employees did well. Robinhood, snowflake, UiPath, Toast, Roblox, Coinbase etc. we are not short of large tech IPOs.
You might not get rich, but there are plenty of folks out there who have made a few hundred thousand in a small company IPO, or an extra $50k for 6 months of work, or whatever.
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