Predictable Liquidity for Employees
Matthew Moore, head of design at Lime, on private stock and employee diversification
This is what life looks like when a company becomes too big and too valuable for the old startup bargain of wait for the IPO. At Uber, employees had years of paper wealth but no clear exit date, so even loose internal talk that the company might stay private made equity feel less like a future bonus and more like a concentrated personal risk. That is why small, sporadic secondary windows mattered so much.
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Uber did offer liquidity, but it was irregular. Moore describes an internal quarterly program for some longer tenured employees that later ended, then a 2018 SoftBank tender where demand was so high employee sales were cut back. That is a sign of pent up need, not casual profit taking.
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The deeper issue was predictability. When people do not know if the next tender is in months or years, each window feels like the only chance to de risk. Research on recurring liquidity programs shows the opposite dynamic, regular sales reduce pressure, improve price discovery, and make employees less likely to anchor on one all or nothing decision.
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This also explains why late stage companies started acting more like privately traded companies. Once a business is large enough to compete with public companies for talent, illiquid stock stops working as full compensation. Periodic liquidity becomes part of pay, not a side benefit, and helps the company recruit, retain, and prepare for eventual public market scrutiny.
The market has moved toward more structured and recurring private liquidity for exactly this reason. As companies stay private longer, the winners will be the ones that turn equity from a vague promise into a schedule employees can plan around, while using those same transactions to build price history and a cleaner path to going public later.