How Early Did Ben Horowitz Go Public?

Ben Horowitz went public on $2 million in trailing 12-month revenue, 18 months after founding, on a forecast from $2 million to $75 million. He calls the offering clearly a bad idea. After talking to literally every investor in the private markets, the other choice was bankruptcy, and bankruptcy was worse.

The magic was making that bad choice without hesitating. Many companies went bankrupt at that point because they did not go public. The workable move is to do the thing that can be done, even when it looks horrible, and not hesitate.

Founders get into the same trouble when they know the product has to be re-architected, or the head of sales has to be fired, then stall because raising money will get harder, the numbers will be missed, features will vanish, or a quarter may be missed with nobody else to blame. All of that can be true, and it is still worse to leave the problem in place. The test is whether the move is the best choice available. If it is the best choice, it gets done now. Thinking through every implication of going public would have blocked the offering, and the implications all happened anyway.