Say you joined a company relatively early. If you're still around years later by an IPO, you probably liked that early environment where you had low-to-no management overhead, large direct impact, and everybody was personally invested in getting shit done. For most employees that environment was already slipping away pre-IPO, but you know you're close to the finish line and can't get off now. What remains is quickly going to be gone post-IPO.
The early employees get major cash-outs; some probably don't need to work at all anymore, so those that treat their job as a means-to-an-end and not their identity leave immediately. Maybe there's big incentives to stay for a few years, paid out annually, hung over your head so you don't quit immediately. But after a year of more managers and TPS reports and public company corporate governance you get your payout... That annual bonus structure practically forces you to decide if you want to leave now, or signup for a whole 'nother year of this, so a wave of people leave. After a 2nd year of this they're mostly gone to greener pastures.
Less-early employees still get significant cash-outs in a large event like this. Maybe they use it to take some time off, it's been a long few years. Once you're out for a while, why not look at what else is out there on the market. Some of them find out they liked this new big-company stuff and want more of it, so they'll probably stay for years. Others are like the early employees and want the good-old days back, they have to go find it somewhere else.
But you're 2 months away from an early RSU grant from vesting you a few hundred thousands dollars on top of the ISO's you haven't cashed out yet. But eventually the right opportunity comes your way and everyone is shocked you're leaving like you were when a legendary person left 6 months earlier. You take a pay cut and probably worse benefits and more ISO's than you could imagine to join that series a or b startup you connected with as soulmates and it's going to be OK.
There is: don't go public or issue stocks. In Germany, we are famous for non-public companies: the "Mittelstand" is largely owned by the founders or their descendants, which frees them from a lot of external influences - for better (companies can focus on long term goals instead of phony quarterly/activist investor-driven "KPI/OKR" goals, companies save on a lot of the bureaucracy that the law mandates for public/share-issuing companies) or worse (we're notorious for a lack of digitalization and progress as well as inheritance squabbles).
An example are the retail chains ALDI and LIDL or manufacturers Bosch and Heraeus - all tens to hundreds of thousands of employees and many billions of net worth, but it's rare to even find somewhat reliable numbers on them.
Those systems and processes are critical to staying out of trouble with the law after going public.
Too many processes are never automated, and people are assigned to manually enforce and follow up on processes, that should be completely automatic.
This is where process busywork creates yet further busywork. Prime example? ITIL (as this is an IT focused site many probably have heard of it).
If you don’t automate the heck out of ITIL you reduces quality, slow any pace down and the mess remains.
