Zero to IPO: Over $1 Trillion of Actionable Advice from the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs

twelve

IPOs

Okta went public on Friday, April 7, 2017. We sold 11 million shares at $17 apiece. As we rang the NASDAQ opening bell that morning, it probably looked pretty good on TV. While it took eight years to get there, by outside metrics, we had succeeded.

Neither Todd nor I saw it that way, however. The IPO wasn’t a finish line. It was just the beginning—more like a graduation from high school. Now it was time to really get cracking.

There’s a lot of mythology around IPOs, so much so that it’s easy to think that going public is the whole point of launching a startup: cash out, retire to a beach, and start drawing up plans for rockets ...