There is a moment most founders never talk about. Not the champagne on listing day, not the newspaper headline, not the ticker symbol appearing on the board for the first time.

The moment that quietly defines the post-IPO experience happens about three months later, when a founder sits in a room full of analysts who have never built anything, answering questions about numbers they know are being misread, defending a quarter that is actually setting up something beautiful for year three — and realizing that nobody in that room cares about year three.

Mohamed Alabbar, the Emirati businessman who built Emaar Properties into one of the world's most recognized real estate empires — responsible for the Burj Khalifa and the Dubai Mall — captured this feeling in a single sentence. At the 1 Billion Followers Summit in Dubai, he said: "Emaar going public was a stupid idea. I need to announce my results every 90 days, so every 90 days I need to strip naked in public."

It got attention because it was honest. Not in the sanitized, boardroom-approved way founders are usually honest in public. Actually honest. The kind of statement that makes other founders nod slowly to themselves and think: someone finally said it.

But Alabbar's comment opens a much larger conversation — one that rarely gets had because the IPO narrative is almost always told from the outside looking in. The roadshow. The valuation. The market debut. What happens to the human being running the company after the bell rings is a story the business press tends to skip. This is that story.

Why Founders Want to Go Public in the First Place

Before exploring the regret, it's worth being honest about the dream. Founders do not stumble into IPOs. For most, going public is a deliberate ambition — sometimes from day one.

The most obvious driver is capital:

An IPO gives a company access to a scale of funding that private rounds simply cannot match in sustainability. Going public allows companies to raise substantial funds from public investors and, crucially, to return to those markets again and again through follow-on offerings without renegotiating with a private syndicate every time. For a founder who has been operating with a perpetual undercapitalization hanging over them, that kind of financial security changes everything about how they think and build.

Then there is the validation piece, which gets underestimated:

A listing is, in the eyes of the market and the world, confirmation that what a founder built is real. Going public elevates a company's credibility and visibility in ways private status cannot replicate. Customers take you more seriously. Enterprise contracts get easier to close. Talent that would never have considered your offer now has a reason to look, because stock options in a listed company carry actual liquidity.

Liquidity is the third driver — and it matters deeply to early believers:

The investors who wrote checks in the seed round, the employees who took equity in lieu of market salaries, the co-founders who grinded through the difficult years — an IPO is their exit ramp. It gives early investors and shareholders a market to sell into, and founders often feel a genuine obligation to deliver that outcome for the people who bet on them early.

There is also something more personal and harder to name: the feeling that public means permanent:

That a listed company has a different kind of gravity. That it has officially graduated from startup to institution. For founders who grew up watching the Fortune 500, or who built in emerging markets where formal recognition matters enormously, the IPO is not just a financial event. It is an identity event.

The Challenges Nobody Prepares Founders For

The pre-IPO process alone is brutal:

The S-1 filing, the legal reviews, the SEC disclosures, the road show — a typical IPO process takes between six and nine months from start to finish and demands executive attention that would otherwise go to running the business. CFOs and general counsels earn their fees in these months. Founders often describe this period as disorienting — they are simultaneously leading a company and performing an extended audition for a permanent audience they will never fully control.

The post-IPO reality is where the real psychological adjustment begins:

Quarterly earnings pressure can force leadership to prioritize short-term stock performance over long-term strategy, and this creates a structural tension that never fully resolves. A founder building a five-year product roadmap must simultaneously defend a ninety-day window to people who may sell their shares by Friday afternoon.

The regulatory and compliance burden is also significant and continuous:

‍Preparing quarterly 10-Q filings costs public companies an average of $1.2 million annually in compliance expenses — capital that, for a company still finding its operational footing, might be better directed toward research or hiring. The administrative weight accumulates quietly until it becomes a defining feature of how the company operates.

And then there is the loss of control — not just strategically, but personally

Once public, activist investors can stage proxy campaigns, seize board seats, and push agendas that founders never signed up for. A company that was once a founder's vision becomes, in part, a vehicle for other people's financial positions. That shift is rarely discussed in the pitch decks founders build for their IPO roadshows.

Founders Who Chose to Stay Private — and Why

Not every founder succumbs to the pull of a public listing. Some of the most admired builders in the world have deliberately stayed private, and their reasons are instructive.

SpaceX is perhaps the most cited example. Elon Musk has kept it private specifically to pursue goals that public markets would never tolerate on a quarterly reporting basis — colonizing Mars is not a business case that survives an earnings call. The private structure gives SpaceX the space, in every sense of the word, to build on decade-long timelines without the price being a stock collapse every time a rocket doesn't land perfectly.

Cargill, one of the largest companies in the United States, has been private for over 150 years. Its leadership has consistently argued that private ownership is what allows them to think generationally rather than quarterly — and to invest in ways that would be punished immediately by public markets.

The common thread is autonomy. Private companies can keep financial strategies, proprietary models, and competitive intelligence away from rivals who would exploit every disclosure. They can make bold, counterintuitive bets without the stock price punishing them before the bet has time to pay off. And founders retain the kind of unilateral decision-making authority that is, in practice, incompatible with being a listed company.

Founders Who Went Public and Regret It

Mohamed Alabbar is not alone. He is just one of the few willing to say it plainly.

Dick Costolo, the former CEO of Twitter, was more circumspect — but the story tells itself. He publicly argued that the ninety-day cadence of quarterly earnings was forcing short-term thinking and undermining the company's ability to build for the long run. Twitter went public in 2013 and Costolo resigned in 2015, after a tenure defined by the mismatch between what public markets wanted and what the platform actually needed.

Michael Dell went a step further. After taking Dell public and watching Wall Street chronically misread his company's transformation from a PC maker into an enterprise services company, he led a $24.4 billion leveraged buyout to take Dell private in 2013. His rationale was direct: the public market could not comprehend what he was building fast enough, and waiting for them to catch up was costing him competitive ground. Going private gave him the platform to restructure and transform without shareholder pressure defining the pace.

Elon Musk tried to do the same with Tesla in 2018, tweeting that he wanted to take the company private at $420 per share, explicitly citing the burden of public market scrutiny. The attempt did not succeed — but the impulse behind it was real and shared by more founders than will ever say so publicly. Jeff Bezos spent years writing shareholder letters that were effectively arguments against the short-termism his own listed structure was producing. Jensen Huang of Nvidia has pointed out that designing next-generation chips takes multi-year cycles that do not map neatly to ninety-day reporting windows.

The pattern is consistent: the founders who feel the IPO regret most acutely are those who are building for the long term in industries that require patience. Real estate. Deep tech. Infrastructure. Energy. These are not ninety-day businesses, and public markets are fundamentally ninety-day machines.

The Advantages Are Real — Which Makes It Harder

Here is the complication: the IPO has genuine upsides, and they are not trivial. That's part of what makes the founder experience so psychologically complex. It is not simply a bad decision with clear regret. It is a trade-off with real value on both sides.

The capital access is transformational. Public equity markets allow companies to raise follow-on capital far faster than private channels — and listed shares can function as acquisition currency, letting companies use their own stock to buy competitors rather than cash. For a founder in an industry with consolidation dynamics, this is a structural advantage that staying private cannot replicate.

The talent equation also changes meaningfully. Public companies can offer stock options that carry real, demonstrable liquidity — not hypothetical future value, but something an employee can actually price on a given day. In competitive hiring markets, especially in technology, that difference matters at the margin of every offer letter.

And Alabbar himself acknowledged the discipline argument. "It differentiates the men from the boys," he said. Public market scrutiny forces internal controls, governance structures, and financial discipline that many private companies delay indefinitely. Some founders, in retrospect, credit the IPO with institutionalizing habits that made their companies significantly better operators — even if the process of getting there felt like a prolonged hazing.

The advantages are real. The costs are also real. What is missing from most pre-IPO conversations is the honest acknowledgment of both, at the same time, without the promotional gloss that accompanies every roadshow.

What Alabbar Actually Meant When He Said "Strip Naked Every 90 Days"

The metaphor is worth sitting with, because it captures something precise.

When Alabbar says he has to "strip naked in front of the public where they can see my weight, how much I've eaten, how much I spend" — he is describing total involuntary transparency. Not the transparency a founder chooses when they write a newsletter or give an interview. The kind that is mandated, scheduled, and delivered to people who did not earn the intimacy and who feel entitled to judge everything they see.

Every ninety days, without exception, a public company founder must disclose: revenue, margins, costs, cash, debt, executive compensation, material risks, pending litigation, operational challenges, and forward guidance — all of which competitors can read, all of which short-sellers can weaponize, all of which journalists can excerpt out of context, and all of which investors can react to within milliseconds of publication. There is no narrative framing that fully protects against this. There is no good quarter where something cannot be found to criticize.

The psychological weight of this is not primarily financial. It is the weight of being evaluated on a schedule you did not choose, by people who do not understand what you are building, using a metric — the quarterly earnings report — that has been widely criticized as mostly noise by serious economists and company builders alike.

Costolo put it this way: the "90-day cadence" of quarterly earnings leads to "short-term thinking." What he did not say — what few founders say publicly — is that it also leads to a particular kind of loneliness. You are performing constantly, to an audience that is always watching and never fully satisfied, and you are doing it while simultaneously trying to run the actual company.

How Founders Can Handle the Pressure Without Losing Themselves

If you are a founder considering a public listing, or already on the other side of one, the question is not how to avoid the scrutiny. You cannot. The question is how to operate well inside it.

The first and most underrated preparation is psychological, not operational:

The founders who navigate post-IPO scrutiny well are those who have genuinely separated their identity from their quarterly results before the listing happens — not during or after. This is harder than it sounds, because for most founders, the company is deeply personal. Its failures feel like personal failures. Its wins feel like personal wins. Public markets will exploit that fusion relentlessly, because a founder who is emotionally reactive to the stock price is an easier target than one who is not.

The second is building a narrative that is longer than ninety days and communicating it consistently:

‍Founders who maintain investor trust through volatility are almost always those who have established a credible long-term thesis and repeated it across every investor communication — including the bad quarters. The founders who struggle are those who change the story based on the results, which teaches the market that there is no story, only results.

Third: surround yourself with people who tell you the truth:

Post-IPO, the pull toward consensus and comfort intensifies, because the stakes are now public. Board members who were honest in private sometimes become more diplomatic in public company settings. The antidote is deliberately cultivating internal advisors who have no financial stake in telling you what you want to hear.

Fourth — and this applies especially to founders in emerging markets who carry the additional weight of representing their country or industry to global capital — recognize that the scrutiny is institutional, not personal:

The analyst downgrading your stock at 9 a.m. does not know you. The algorithm selling your shares does not have a view on whether your five-year strategy is sound. The market is not a critic of you as a person. It is a machine processing information on a schedule. Treating it as anything more than that is where the psychological damage compounds.

Alabbar's punchline, after the naked metaphor, is worth returning to: "But the good thing? It differentiates between the men and the boys." There is something deeply practical in that framing. Not optimistic. Not romantic. Just honest about what the process demands and what it produces in those who survive it.

The Decision Is More Personal Than Financial

The IPO question is ultimately not a spreadsheet question. The numbers can be modeled. The valuation multiples can be compared. The compliance costs can be estimated. What cannot be modeled is how a specific founder — with a specific temperament, a specific vision horizon, and a specific relationship to public scrutiny — will actually experience life as the CEO of a listed company.

Mohamed Alabbar went public in 2000, built one of the most successful real estate companies in the world, and still, a quarter century later, calls it the stupidest idea he ever had. Not because it failed. Because of what it cost him in the currency that does not appear in any earnings report: the freedom to build without performing.

Before you ring that bell, know exactly what you are trading away. The capital is real. The credibility is real. The discipline it enforces is real. And so is the nakedness — every ninety days, without exception, for as long as you remain public.

The men get through it. So do the women, and everyone else building something that matters. But they get through it with clear eyes, not because anyone told them it would be comfortable.

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