I've heard anecdotes that this is indeed the case at Uber. Lots of senior engineers / techs are burned out but can't afford to quit without abandoning their options. Many of them don't do any work at all, and Uber is fine with it because they don't want a mass exodus before the IPO. This is not uncommon around the Valley, but I hear it's especially problematic at Uber. I'm sure it's a continued drag on earnings, but probably not big enough to make a dent in the driver payment gap.

But I honestly doubt that Uber will ever make it to IPO; at least not an IPO that pays off employees in any meaningful way. Their business model is basically "buy for $10 and sell for $8" -- it's fundamentally flawed, and they're about to get a whole bunch of competition in the form of self-driving fleet management. New challengers wouldn't have the overhead of Uber's legacy infrastructure / driver incentives / etc. and much of the tech that made Uber unique has been commoditized. I doubt their IPO will even cover the late-stage investment they've received; much of their valuation was based on brand value which has been thoroughly destroyed by recent scandals.

Wow, is this a real phenomenon? This is fascinating.

I would love for one of these people to speak on the record about this, but I imagine that’ll never happen.

There are lockup periods that prevent them selling.

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answer/12/ipo-lockup-period...

>For example, Facebook's IPO lock up prevented the sale of 271 million shares during the company's first three months of public ownership. FB hit an all-time low of $19.69 the day its first lock-up period ended, a price about 50% lower than the share price on the day the company went public. Further restrictions prevented the sale of another 1.66 billion shares through mid-2013. Facebook's unusual lock-up policy released insider shares at five different dates.

All the more reason to quit just before the IPO! (assuming they own the shares)

Nearly all insiders (i.e. management, investors, employees, etc.) will be subject to a "lock-up" on an IPO that prevents them from selling immediately. Typically the lock-up lasts for 180 days, but this can vary.

Share price does often drop when the lock-up expires, but usually not as much as you'd expect--the number of restricted shares to be release and resulting liquidity effects of that expiration are well know and disclosed in public filings. So this mostly gets baked into pricing well in advance.