Paulo

i have a post-ipo opportunity theory. the moment a company becomes public, it means you can start building its competitor almost right away. not because the company becomes bad, but because the nature of incentives changes. before that, punishment mostly comes from users. after that, punishment can increasingly come from shareholders, which means the company becomes more locked into a direction and naturally more risk averse. they also become less agile. radical thinking gets harder, pivots get harder, changing and adjusting constantly gets harder, while this is basically a huge part of what building a company is in the first place. and then there is the legal and organisational nature of being public. you are simply no longer free to speak, react and move in the same way a startup can. there are more layers, more people involved, more things that need to be explained and made predictable. the reason i'm quoting the figma's launch is because, to me, this video represents exactly that. look at almost any large public company and eventually they start producing ads at a similar level of abstraction: emotional, character driven, less about a very specific user problem and more about the category, the brand and market dominance. i'm not saying it's a bad ad. i'm saying a startup usually can't afford to make this kind of ad. it would be a waste of money, and more importantly, it's not really its language yet. every stage of a company has its own marketing tools that are aligned with its scale. what works for apple would never work for someone building a DIY mp3 player in a garage, and what works for that person would probably look ridiculous coming from apple. and i think the same is true beyond marketing. as companies grow, they gain scale, trust, distribution and power, but they also leave certain ways of thinking and behaving behind. because every time a company becomes too large to move in a certain way, someone smaller gets a free spot to move exactly like that.