Some Thoughts on the Fiverr IPO

Late last week, Fiverr went public. The New York Stock Exchange is about to open for a new trading session and for the first time, Fiverr’s shares will be trading publicly on the Exchange. The IPO celebrations over the past weekend focused on the company’s founders and investors. But an inseparable part of the celebrations are the employees who have been with the startup from its early days and helped build and bring the company to its current success – and now is the time to congratulate them.

Moments like these are why we created EquityBee – to enable employees to enjoy the fruits of their hard work at the startups they helped to build, by partnering with investors in the challenging journey towards a startup’s unknown future.

Indeed, Fiverr’s IPO has created several dozen new millionaires. We do not mean just the kinds of people you read about in the newspapers, but dozens of employees, some mid-level managers and others simply employees of the company since the beginning, when a billion-dollar valuation was still a dream. The IPO has transformed these employees who held options packages into millionaires (in terms of the value of their shares).

Last year we met with employees who left Fiverr before the IPO who needed to exercise their options in order to sell them in the IPO. For some of these employees, it took tens of thousands of dollars to exercise these options and so they came to us to help fund their option packages. Although this is a significant investment for the average employee with considerable risk, those who did exercise their shares are now able to reap the profits from owning the shares. In some cases, this can be a life-changing profit.

Our mission is to help employees benefit from their hard work at startups, to give them the flexibility to change jobs to help them build the next Fiverr. If you have any questions or would like to learn more, please contact us and we will be happy to help.