What I'm suggesting didn't require some crazy foresight. It was the obvious move. Stripe was fully capable of going public at any point in that period, and analysts, investors, insiders were all calling for it to happen. Every other tech "unicorn" in its cohort – Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Pinterest, Slack, Snowflake, Zoom, Palantir and like a hundred more – did just that. Stripe choosing to stay public was a deliberate decision by the founders, one that did not work out.

Very few people were confident enough to make a financial bet that tech valuations would tank by 50%. I'm not arguing whether it did or didn't work. I'm trying to point out that anyone who could have predicted this change in tech valuations stood to make a crap ton of money regardless of what Stripe did. You make it sound obvious--that's hindsight bias. It wasn't obvious.

Is there more available on the actual reasons why they didn't go public earlier?

>Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Pinterest, Slack, Snowflake, Zoom, Palantir and like a hundred more – did just that. Stripe choosing to stay public was a deliberate decision by the founders, one that did not work out.

I guess that depends on what you mean by "worked out". For Stripe employees, maybe it didn't.

For the public at large, many of whom are underwater owning shares in the companies you mentioned, maybe it did?

Yes that's exactly what I mean

It feels like you are falling into Survivorship Bias fallacy.