Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon tells startups to reconsider going public

Goldman Sachs is one of the biggest investment banker “book runners” for IPOs – where banks are paid many millions of dollars for each listing they underwrite. Yet CEO David Solomon told attendees of the Cisco AI Summit in Palo Alto that startups should reconsider the idea of going public, reports the Financial Times. 

Solomon said startups can scale just as big and get plenty of money in the private markets, without having to deal with the hassle of being a publicly traded company. 

“It’s not fun being a public company,” he said. “Who would want to be a public company?” 

Goldman is working more and more with large private companies, including helping Stripe on its $6.5 billion round in 2023. Stripe is part of the growing class of large, private tech companies that are deciding to remain private for much longer.