Does It Make Sense for Every Company to Go Public? - Eventbrite Case
- ZIIX Growth
- Dec 6
- 7 min read
Updated: Dec 7
For decades, going public has been portrayed as the ultimate rite of passage for successful companies; a badge of honor signaling scale, maturity, and future dominance. Tech founders romanticize ringing the bell at the NYSE. Investors see IPOs as a gateway to liquidity and wealth. Employees dream of stock-based windfalls. And the media treats every newly listed company as the next great American success story.
But the truth, is that going public is not universally the right strategic move. In fact, for many companies, it becomes a burden that exposes weaknesses, magnifies structural challenges, and forces short-term thinking in pursuit of quarterly expectations.
Few stories illustrate this reality better than the fall of Eventbrite, the ticketing platform that once captured Silicon Valley’s imagination but never managed to deliver the growth needed to justify its public valuation. Its recent acquisition by Italian tech conglomerate Bending Spoons for just $500 million is the perfect case study of how the dream of going public can devolve into a cautionary tale.
This article explores why going public doesn’t always make sense, what went wrong for Eventbrite, how a fundamentally challenged business model collides with the pressures of the public markets, and what founders should learn from this story.
The IPO Dream vs. The IPO Reality
Going public is often framed as a milestone, a moment that validates years of hard work and opens the door to capital, visibility, and prestige. While those benefits are real, they come with a new set of pressures:
Public markets demand consistent, fast growth.
Quarterly scrutiny leaves no room for narrative-based promises.
Operational challenges become front-page news.
Strategic pivots are harder under the spotlight.
Public investors quickly abandon companies with unpredictable economics.
For businesses operating in volatile, thin-margin, or structurally constrained industries, these pressures can become overwhelming.
Eventbrite faced exactly this: a business whose fundamentals were not built for the public markets, even if the story sounded good on paper.
Eventbrite Case Study
