David Rosenthal: uncertainty

Transcript context

…And you know, we’re not accusing anybody of doing that because it’s one of these things where like the whole world is telling you yes and it seems like the train is going to keep going and then you’re going to IPO and you’re going to do another up round and it’s all just going to happen. But when you start reasoning from fundamentals, it does get a little scary. I completely agree with you, Ben. Like I don’t know the Square management team personally but I seriously doubt they were actively trying to screw their employees. No. They seem like incredible, incredible years and operators. So okay, we’re in What Would Have Happened Otherwise, and in thinking about that, one option and this is I think really hard to expect this of someone, but one option is back when they had I think their Series D that was Starbucks and Sacca was in the neighborhood of 3.5 billion, instead of that private round, they could have just tried to go public and doing that earlier might have been able to do a flatter or up IPO like at a higher valuation or maybe at that 3.5 billion valuation, at least up from their Series C from Kleiner Perkins, and it’s hard to do that because the business wasn’t as mature yet and it’s really hard to want to face that sort of public scrutiny. But as you say, the business was fairly mature then and their model was pretty... the fundamentals of the business has been the same for a very long time.…

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