IPO season is back, baby. Or… maybe not. Depending on when you read this, it may or may not be poppin.
Every time it feels like the window’s creaking open, something macro and messy slams it shut again: inflation print, geopolitical drama, someone in the Oval office getting hired / fired.
But let’s be optimistic for a minute. Because a few brave souls are filing S-1s, ding donging bells, and trying to make fetch IPOs happen again.
Before we get into the preflight checklist for going public, let’s start with a simple question:
Why go public in the first place?
Here are the top three:
Liquidity for employees
Marketing bump with enterprise customers
Street cred and trust with buyers
The first two reasons get all the airtime. Liquidity makes early employees and VCs happy. Marketing gives you your 15 minutes in Times Square and a picture ringing the bell like a corporate prom king (the pictures can be so cringe but, like, I also really really wanna be in one. Does that make sense?)
But the third reason, customer trust, doesn’t get talked about enough. It should.
Take PagerDuty. They went public in 2019, just after eclipsing $100 million in revenue. That’s early by most standards, then or now. These days you’d be hard pressed to find a company willing to make the leap below $500m in revenue. But it wasn’t about chasing a point-in-time valuation or opportunistically jumping through an open window before it closed. They were intentional about going public because it showed enterprise customers they were here to stay.
Howard Wilson, their long time CFO, said big buyers kept asking the same thing:
“How do we know you’ll still be around in two years?”
When you’re selling mission-critical software, the kind that needs to be up even when your customer’s own systems are down, that question matters. Buyers want visibility. They want to see your balance sheet, your cash flow, your path forward.
As Howard put it,
“Going public took the guesswork out of the conversation. Customers could see we were legit.”
That lesson stuck with me. An IPO isn’t just a marketing moment or liquidity event. For many companies, it’s a credibility play.
What You Actually Need to Be Good At
One of the biggest misconceptions about going public is that you need to have all the answers in-house on day one. You don’t. You’re not launching a space shuttle. You’re filing paperwork and getting your back yard in order.
The IPO is full of one-time activities. Writing the S-1. Working with bankers. Setting a price range. Most of that happens once. So don’t waste time building permanent muscles for temporary problems.
Howard told me that when PagerDuty went public, his team split everything into two buckets:
Stuff you only need to do once to get out the door
Stuff you need to do well quarter after quarter
The first bucket? Outsource it. Hire a good audit partner. Rent some IR horsepower. Don’t try to turn your team into S-1 experts overnight. Most of that work is a one-time lift. You want the best in the biz, just not on payroll.
As Howard explained:
“What were the things that were one-offs, specific to getting ready to be a public company and the IPO process, and what were the things that needed to be durable, the skills and capabilities that were going to be important for the ongoing health of the business?
And while sometimes my team was really keen to be involved in the IPO activities because they found it exciting, we tried to moderate that to the extent that we could so that they could build the capabilities that were long-term.”
The second part of that statement is worth repeating - everyone wants in on the fun. It’s a big career milestone for the team. Most people don’t get to take a company public. So there’s a balancing act of allowing people to share in the experience and improve their resumes, and making sure you’re focusing their efforts on the marathon ahead, and not point in time capabilities.
Let’s cover the other bucket Howard identified, where you invest. Howard focused on three investment areas:
Accounting,
Forecasting, and
SEC reporting.
For accounting, they already had a strong controller, so they leaned in there and made sure the surrounding team was capable.
“The standard of accounting that you need as a public company is much higher, and we made sure that we focused on having a strong controller and a strong team in place to make sure that we could meet the requirements from a public company perspective.”
For SEC reporting, they brought in someone who had done it before. Not to build a huge team, but because the rules are specific, the timeline is tight, and there’s no room for error. You don’t need to know every footnote format, but someone on your team does. Hiring for specific skill sets to scaffold your own blind spots is a talent the best CFOs build. As Howard explained,
“SEC reporting is like an unusual area of expertise, right? It’s intense requirements and requires high levels of accuracy. You need to ensure that you're managing that effectively. So that was one of the first areas where we hired a really talented person in to head up that function.”
So while they didn’t have all the SEC guns in house on day one, over the next year as a public company they moved from external expertise to in house in a contemplated fashion.
For FP&A, they got serious about forecasting. Not just this quarter versus last quarter, but how your forecast rolls forward over time and lines up with what you’re telling the Street. It’s trickier than it sounds.
“And then the third area was around FP&A and forecasting and just trying to understand that whole lineup of guidance versus your forecast versus your internal plan.
You end up with all these iterations. And it sounds at a conceptual level as though, “Oh, this should be really quite easy. You have a plan with your board, and then you have a stretch plan for your internal target, and then you have a forecast that you're maintaining and you're going to provide guidance relative to your forecast.”
Sounds easy in theory, but you're not forecasting for one quarter. So you're always having to think about, “If I make this forecast now for the full year, how does this play out each successive quarter? What does this look like?” And there's an art and a science to doing that.”
(We’ll be covering the art and science of beat and raise forecasting in next weeks post.)
The takeaway? Not all things are created equal, and there are some things that you can, in a sense, delay hiring for until you are further along. There are good providers in the market, and so take advantage of them.
And this post wouldn’t be complete without speaking to the intersection of people and tech. To supplement the people, it was also critical to hone in on the technological backbone of stuff that mattered.
The Tools That Actually Matter
When you're private you can get away with a lot. Manual processes. Spreadsheets stitched together with gross Sum Ifs. Some random guy named Carl who knows how all the tabs work (that’s me).
But once you're public, that all breaks. You need clean data, tight controls, and systems that don’t go blue screen of death under pressure.
PagerDuty made some early investments here. NetSuite for ERP. Avalara for tax. Zuora for billing. Anaplan for forecasting. Workiva for SEC filings. All that stuff takes time to implement and even more time to trust.
Howard said they were intentional about which tools they brought in before the IPO. The rule of thumb was simple: if the process needs to be repeatable, automate it. If it just needs to get done once, rent some help.
A word on implantations: the tools we mentioned take time (and money) to work right. You ideally will want two quarters of using them in house to close the books before you need to hit refresh in the public markets. The first quarter you are always closing on two systems - the new and the old. And the second quarter is like a tight rope walk without a net. Best to do that in private.
Plus, if you do it right, you can write off some of the implementation fees as one time costs associated with IPO readiness. These will go below the line when you file and won’t bleed into your first few public quarters as you try to hit your profitability targets.
So start earlier on the systems front, but don’t get distracted by shiny logos or over-engineering things you don’t need yet. You don’t have to build a Rolls-Royce to file a 10-Q.
Build the backbone. Then iterate and upgrade.
The “What to Build vs. What to Rent” Framework
There’s a temptation to build everything in-house ahead of an IPO. You want to look polished, self-sufficient, and buttoned up. But that mindset can burn time and budget fast. And worse, it can distract you from the things that actually move the needle post-IPO.
The better question is: What do I need to own, and what can I borrow until I get there?
Howard had a simple lens for this: if it’s a repeatable muscle you’ll need long-term, build it. If it’s a one-off or there’s a great provider in the market, rent it.
Here’s how that plays out in practice:
Investor Relations: Early on, PagerDuty leaned on a third-party IR firm. Six years later, they still work together. You don’t need a full-time head of IR right away — but you do need someone who knows how to shape a story and handle Q&A under pressure.
Internal Audit: They got help from a Big Four firm for IPO readiness, then layered in internal capability after the dust settled. No one’s going to ding you for not having SOX 404 perfect on day one, but you do need a plan to get there.
SEC Filing Systems: Workiva helped PagerDuty manage their first wave of filings. Not because it’s cheap, but because it works and it saves your team from version-control nightmares. You can always reevaluate tooling later, once your processes are mature.
This isn’t just an IPO lesson. It’s a broader operating model for scaling teams without bloating them.
Next week we’re going to dive into one of the MUST HAVE functions in house - Beat and Raise forecasting. BYOS (bring ya own spreadsheet).
In the meantime, here’s the podcast I recorded with Howard Wilson of PagerDuty
Full links to your episode are below.
