#ipo

Fidelity owns 10% of SpaceX, ironic that employees can't participate in IPOs but Fidelity itself can. Anyways do you think the success/failure of SpaceX IPO will impact the NAV of chairman shares?

Crypto exchange Kraken recently laid off approximately 150 employees. The company cited increased efficiencies from deploying artificial intelligence. These staff reductions could delay its planned US initial public offering. Kraken now reportedly aims for a public debut in 2027. Other crypto firms also cut jobs this year, often citing AI use.

https://www.tradingview.com/news/cointelegraph:b71f2d6f4094b:0-kraken-cuts-150-staff-amid-ai-efficiencies-potentially-delaying-ipo-report/

Billionaire Jim Goodnight Built An Analytics Profit Machine. AI Is Forcing Its Reinvention.

ByPhoebe Liu,Reporter.

May 15, 2026, 06:30am EDT
Updated May 15, 2026, 10:36am EDT

Unlike most of today’s biggest AI companies, SAS—once America’s largest privately held software company—has always operated slowly, steadily and profitably. Competition from all sides and an upcoming leadership transition will test the company’s longstanding strategy.

Clad in a plain white shirt, Jim Goodnight, billionaire cofounder and CEO of analytics firm SAS, eases into a leather rolling chair in a Cary, North Carolina, meeting room that looks less like a corner office than a geology exhibit. Behind him are glistening gemstones. A clump of pyrite. Purple amethysts. A fossilized dinosaur egg—a 69-million-year-old Hadrosaurus found in the Gobi Desert. A meteorite. “It’s not something you want to get hit in the head by,” he deadpans.

SAS is 50. Its CEO is 83. And like the rocks on display, both are artifacts from an earlier time long before fast-growing, deeply-unprofitable AI shook the world. SAS analyzes large troves of data from its customers in real-time to help them make better business decisions.

“People like to dismiss us by saying, ‘well, that’s legacy software,’” says Goodnight, a statistics pioneer who helped define what analytics would be long before AI became an umbrella term for everything. “But it’s not. We’ve been improving it for 50 years.”

Now SAS has to prove that endurance isn’t the same thing as stagnation.

The company generates just over $3 billion in annual revenue from most of the Fortune 100—including 90% of the financial services companies and all of the health and life sciences firms, plus most every government department. It has stayed private, profitable and debt free.

The AI bo-m is stress-testing that posture. OpenAI, Anthropic and a swarm of newer data-and-analytics rivals are selling the future as a clean break from “legacy” incumbents. Hyperscalers like Microsoft and Amazon are bundling data and AI into cloud contracts. Public-sector competition is heating up. And inside SAS, the next chapter is no longer theoretical: Goodnight has been hinting for years at a leadership transition, including an IPO as a possible succession plan. “When we go public, we need a different CEO,” he says. “You don’t want an old fa-t like me going around trying to sell stock.”

For a company designed to outlast market volatility, an uncomfortable question is suddenly immediate: can SAS modernize fast enough to matter in the AI era—without abandoning the slow, profitable discipline that made it an outlier in the first place? And can it do it without Goodnight?

Goodnight is confident it can; he’s seen this cycle before: the dot-com bo-m, when he considered outside money and passed; the dot-com bust, which rewarded that restraint; failed investments, including an airline; and the 2022 market correction which may have forced SAS to delay its IPO plans. He’s unmoved by the idea that generative AI has rewritten the laws of business.

AI is “just picking the next word in a sentence based on probability,” Goodnight says, correctly, of large language models. “How’s that going to solve anything?” He thinks SAS’ decades of customer trust and “domain expertise,” particularly in finance, healthcare and government services, will help it retain its edge.

Yet Goodnight will likely leave SAS’ future in the age of AI to younger hands.

In recent years, he has ceded more of the daily operating work to a new generation of executives, especially chief technology officer Bryan Harris and chief operating officer Gavin Day. Goodnight says he’s training Harris and Day to take over, though he hasn’t yet decided which of the two he would like as CEO.

The plan they are inheriting is simple to describe and hard to execute: persuade customers that SAS is not the same company it was 50 years ago, sell them on AI that helps them make smarter business decisions instead of merely sounding like it might, and mold the products to meet every customer where it’s needed.

“Incumbency is our biggest headwind,” says Harris.

That incumbency can be seen in SAS’ sprawling North Carolina headquarters. Its 300-acre tree-lined property boasts a day care and doctor’s office, fields dotted with employees playing intramural soccer at lunchtime, one of the state’s few five-star hotels and dozens of docile sheep grazing underneath the company’s solar panels. Turn left from Analytics Drive onto Research Drive and walk down Binary Way, and you’ll be blinded by a shining silver sculpture of the mathematical constant pi. The company’s campus, as they call it, reflects Goodnight’s vision and SAS’ academic origins.

SAS, short for Statistical Analysis System, was born out of North Carolina State University where Goodnight—then a young faculty member fresh out of a statistics PhD—teamed up with Tony Barr in the late 1960s to create software that sifted through and analyzed N.C. State’s agriculture department data. After the tool attracted more than 100 outside customers, Goodnight, Barr, John Sall and Jane Helwig incorporated SAS Institute in 1976. Barr sold his 40% stake for $340,000 in 1979. Helwig, who died in 2021, left and sold her stake a couple of years later. Goodnight now owns two-thirds of SAS, making him worth $13.3 billion and the richest man in North Carolina; Sall owns the remaining third, a $6.5 billion stake.

From the beginning, the company was bootstrapped. Back when SAS software was sold as physical books, all staff—including the founders—would form an assembly line every time a new shipment of books arrived to unload the books into an employee’s basement, a tradition cofounder Sall recalls as “book brigades.”

When the phones from prospective customers stopped ringing, Sall says Goodnight—in keeping with his upbringing as a hardware shopkeeper’s son—forced the cofounders to split up SAS’ potential customers into four (grouped alphabetically) and do the marketing themselves.

The approach worked. SAS was cash-flow positive from day one and generated $600 million (revenue) on an estimated $300 million in operating income by 1996, Forbes previously reported. SAS grew steadily, always prioritizing profitability over the fastest possible growth, Sall says.

Along the way, as evidenced by its campus, SAS built up a reputation as a company that takes care of its employees. Extensive benefits—beginning with free M&Ms (11,000 pounds per week, company-wide) then expanding to on-site doctors and a pharmacy, subsidized on-site childcare and a hair salon—weren’t common in the ’80s and ’90s. It was Goodnight's retention strategy: keep employees happy, keep turnover low and avoid the expensive churn of bonuses and dilutive stock options.

He used to joke that 95% of SAS’ assets, its people, drove out the front gate every night. After the pandemic and a remote-work policy, the line no longer works quite the same way. “I can’t even get ’em to come in,” he says.

Three years ago, Harris brought Goodnight an idea he loved. SAS could use computer vision to analyze video feeds from farms and determine how illnesses spread among chickens. The tool would help farmers keep their flocks healthy. Goodnight ki-led it with a single question: “How much do the cameras cost? The farmers would never pay for that.”

From the perspectives of both customers like those farmers and SAS itself, Goodnight has been laser-focused on cost and profitability for decades. He criticized AI innovation for being 90% wasted dollars, and repeatedly emphasized SAS’ need to get further into the green.

The CEO credits SAS’ durability to that desire to stay profitable, even at the expense of rapid growth. While Anthropic has reportedly grown revenue at roughly 10 times year over year for three years, SAS’ revenue rose 9% last quarter, roughly in line with Morningstar's prediction that software companies will grow at around 10% per year through 2029.

Goodnight thinks the AI companies’ pace “needs to slow down.” But that doesn’t mean SAS has ignored the market. In 2023, the company announced a three-year, $1 billion investment to develop AI-powered products. “It looked like we were going to spend that much anyway, so we announced it,” Goodnight says flatly.

The problem is that SAS is hardly alone here. It is up against rivals that bet on AI first, and more heavily. On the mega-cap side, there’s Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle. Slightly newer entrants: Snowflake, Databricks, Alteryx and others. On the public sector side, Palantir has been siphoning U.S. government contracts from SAS and others. (Palantir’s U.S. government revenue grew by around double SAS’ total government revenue last year.)

SAS’ modus operandi is to meet customers wherever they are most anxious. The company works with nearly every major bank and the Big Four accounting firms, helping them use AI in ways that are secure, traceable and useful for fraud detection and financial risk. Healthcare, government, finance and other regulated industries are natural terrain for a company that has spent decades selling caution as a feature. Even there, the pressure is rising. Anthropic has been hiring industry experts and in May announced a suite of financial-services products that compete directly for the same customers.

“Everyone is in ‘coopetition,’” Harris says. Customers have asked SAS to integrate with its rivals, and the company has happily obliged.

That has made SAS uniquely malleable among its peers. If customers want their data analysis done in the cloud (Microsoft, Amazon, you name it), SAS can do it. If they want it done on premises, SAS will do that too—and in the programming language of your choice. That matters in hospitals and government agencies, especially when sensitive data and regulation collide here and abroad. In the executive building where customers are flown in for meetings, one screen recently read, “Welcome, U.A.E. Government Delegation.”

Harris thinks new revenue streams can come from digital twins—AI-rendered versions of complex physical facilities like manufacturing plants that are used to figure out a facility’s most efficient layout, predict safety incidents without putting workers at risk, and perform virtual testing—via a partnership with Epic Games. Paper products manufacturer Georgia Pacific, for example, uses them to test and train robots in its Savannah River Mill facility, keeping costs down and employees safe. Digital twins currently generate single-digit millions in revenue, but Harris believes the business can grow to $500 million within three or four years.

SAS is also experimenting with quantum computing for ultra-complex transactions, like in fraud detection for banks, that traditional computers can’t handle. Also in SAS’ plans: using data and AI to help sports teams. In December, SAS announced a partnership with Liverpool to use its products to market to the soccer team’s fans better. At SAS’ 50th anniversary conference, the company announced a smattering of new tools that incorporate AI agents.

“SAS has never met a problem they didn’t want to go after,” says IDC research director Kathy Lange, who previously worked at SAS and suggested that the company could benefit from more focus. “It’s a double-edged sword.”

Believing it’s the best way to sell some of his stake without needing to sell SAS for parts, Goodnight still wants an IPO. But five years after SAS first said it was preparing to go public, the window has narrowed, shifted and occasionally looked like a regret chute.“We don't want to go when all the money has been already used for SpaceX,”

The numbers also need work. Before hitting the roadshow, Goodnight wants to meet the Rule of 40, a common software company benchmark in which revenue growth rate and profit margin sum to 40. That might help the company defend its share price in public markets, especially when pitted against fast-growing competition. But with both components sitting at around 10%, Goodnight says SAS isn’t even halfway there.

For CFO Matt Parson, it’s optionality that’s the key here. SAS has to be ready for the public markets, but they can’t be the only path to helping Goodnight and Sall sell some of their stake. Why sell? The founders’ children aren’t planning to take over, but Goodnight and Sall might still like to leave them with some cash. They’ve yet to take much out of SAS: the company pays out a small dividend, but has invested most profits—“many billions of dollars”—back into the business over its lifetime.

In case an IPO isn’t possible, Parson thus wants to prepare the firm for other solutions: an acquisition or outside investment. The company routinely gets acquisition offers, but Goodnight hasn’t entertained any of them. (The last publicly reported bid was Broadcom’s $15-20 billion offer in 2021; it was progressing until Goodnight changed his mind.) A minority investment could be in the cards, according to Parson, if the right partner came along. If SAS can remain profitable, it can also stay as-is for the foreseeable future: private and founder-owned.

Sipping a cup of black coffee, this time in front of a piece of the Berlin Wall he helped smash, Goodnight is risk-adverse as ever. He is ready to stop being the face of the story he created.

“I wish people knew nothing about me,” he says, with a wink

I've got an offer from a startup. The role is a step up, more senior title, and more interesting work, but my total compensation would drop by about forty five percent compared to where I am now. The difference is equity. If they IPO in the next few years, I could make way more than I'm making now. If they don't, or if the stock is worthless, I've just taken a massive pay cut for nothing. I'm trying to decide if I'm crazy for even considering it. I've got a mortgage and a kid. Stability matters. But I'm also miserable at Open Text. Has anyone taken this kind of risk and had it pay off?

So it appears that Stefano's Boots chain is being spun off and will have an IPO. Don't know when this will happen as the article was paywalled, but I guess this is/was part of Mr. P's plans to regain his losses? I wonder if this would have any effect on Walgreens, or nothing since they're separated now.

Let me start with that all of the below are my opinions based on very close up observations of the people I'm commenting on and that I won't refer to anyone by name below the ET Level.

Cengage is only about optics at this point and I wouldn't be surprised if their main focus was maintaining the illusion as they work to go public and cash out.

First, Mr. Hansen has been and is a terrible leader who has largely rewarded terrible leaders and pushing out those that inspired.

He brought in one of the worst bullies I've ever seen in as Chief Product Officer and has continued this pattern of getting rid of true leaders with true vision that challenged the status quo over BS artists whose only talents are internal backstabbing, firing people, and posting articles that appear to be written by AI on LinkedIn as to appear as some profound thought leaders (see Mr. Wolbe and Mr. Persons).

How many reorgs and transformations do the same folks get before realizing the real problem is with leadership, not the operating model nor the people doing the jobs of 4 people for the salary of someone that is entry level.

How much money does Mr. Wolbe get to spend on consultants that do nothing but waste money while people that kept the company functioning are let go?

Instead of leveraging things like Cengage Unlimited to be disruptive, they just added this to yet another offering in their overly complex GTM model as none of these back stabbing leaders understand this business or, seemingly, any others.

The AI strategy is a joke with tools that are unlikely to be used and the arrogance and incompetence of "fake it until you make it" Mr. Persons running the show. The company is thus likely many years behind competitors here and AI is pure theater at Cengage.

For the competent, hard working folks at Cengage, the reward is layoffs or taking on the work of those laid off. Then training your likely, incompetent replacements.

For some reason, many of those that are known underperformers have slipped under the radar while top performers are moving onto competitors and the companies that will ultimately disrupt Cengage.

The focus seems to be to try and make the P&L look as good as possible for the IPO and then for those that can cash out to do so while leaving the barely functioning company and problem for the next regime (assuming there is a company left)

For those still there, everything you have worked on and given your blood, sweat, and tears to has already been destroyed.

You can stay and train the incompetent, ex-management consulting replacements or you can try to find another job now and leave those working to cash out holding the bag.

With the outsourcing of content and seemingly irresponsible use of AI in creating content for products, I'm not sure why anyone would use or trust a Cengage Product at this point.

The industry and customers are watching as those you fired are the trusted thought leaders in the future of Education and those you have leading are seen as irrelevant folks regurgitating AI-generated slop. I'm sure you were embarrassed at ASU.

We’re getting ready to be ready to be IPO ready!
Congrats everyone, job well done!

Rumors swirling robotics will be spun out for IPO or private equity.

I’m predicting some form of internal IPO announcement/details as part of 50 year anniversary activities…

let the downvotes commence

IPO is dead on arrival. No further comments.

Priced below the proposed offering, ended the delay below the IPO price, and took Medtronic down almost the full value of the spinoff. Man Geoff, Que and the whole gang are hitting on all cylinders. This is the flywheel of innovation at work i guess.

Delgado-Jenkins’ retirement continues a flurry of executive exits from 7-Eleven since the end of 2025, including DePinto, Harris and former chief marketing officer Marissa Jarratt. The leadership shakeups come in a year that promises seismic change for 7-Eleven, including a planned initial public offering in North America.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/7-eleven-chief-merchandising-officer-100000552.html

IPO is not within reach.

Net income YoY did not hit targets.

SF, CA office is being abandoned for a new one in Birmingham, AL.

Raises this year are abysmal.

Start looking now. They are willing to let people with years of institutional knowledge go. Let them.

Store Manager/RXM bonus this year is 75% based on "company numbers" that this private company controls and self reports.

Only 25% of the bonus is based on your store or pharmacy.

Do you trust Sycamore?

Have they been transparent and trustworthy?

Their #1 goal is IPO and staging the numbers for the underwriters that determine their IPO value.

Low expenses and cutting payroll helps them accomplish their goal.

Its Feb and everyone is saying they are coming but name departments please. Morrows kickoff meeting was this week.

I had a reliable source tell me something big is about to be announced but wouldnt say. has to do with us being sold, buying, or going public is all they said.

All the top leaders, top contributors have mostly been kicked out or left, there is a real knowledge gap, quality issues, and continuous layoffs that's forcing basically leftover seasoned employees out. How will this company run ? How will it ever get its golden IPO ?? Who will buy Nielsen stocks ??

It’s official! We are going public. Nice to see Michael’s strategy finally paying off. Excited to see what the future holds as an S&P 500 company.

So with Boots being the biggest money maker for them, I heard rumors that they were going to maybe IPO Boots? What do you think (hypothetically) the plan would be for the other two? Since these 3 would be where Sycamore can extract value from, I assume Walgreens would be fattened with debt and left to be gutted? Unless they have any aspiration of trying to save it.......

What do you guys think? Trying to understand how a PE would try to extract value with this deal.

Ok seems like no one has been talking about it, what do we know about this missile solutions IPO? seems like no one knows anything more than the vague sh-t the Kube said on Monday. I'm in a location where we have two separate divisions under one roof (one being missile solutions) after however many reorgs so just more shuffling chairs???

Do employees get early access? Is there a way for employees to buy? HELP!!

Will the stock ever be above the October 2021 IPO of $47.00? What happened?

Hearing rumours that an IPO is coming in the new financial year. Looks like things will continue to be destabilised

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/14/business/bill-pulte-mobile-homes-fhfa.html

Politico: ‘Sold POTUS a bill of goods’: WH furious with Pulte over 50-year mortgage. This might put a kabash on the ipo idea and pulte himself. But Mike might still want to continue with the layoffs. It’s his favorite thing to do - to get rid of people. If it was up to him, he would just work with strings, pixel and numbers

Hopefully SF is considering de-mutualizing in efforts to remain a force in the industry. Not to mention an IPO and/or being purchased by another stock company could be both beneficial for current and future employees… as well as attracting and retaining top talent.

Media reports are swirling

Elliott made a play at $1.2 billion new debt at over 10% interest nielsen has to pay. New debt mean more ways to cut cost to show profit. Sign Elliott is ready to cash out and move on. When do we think the IPO will be?

Many people are expected to make lots of money on the IPO shares sale, including Pulte’s friends. Some of them are now getting the contracts and Fannie and Freddie are paying for the contracts.

what wonders private equity does for a company. the IPO is a failure will employees be let go?

I guess most if not all of this article seemed to be available from the link I've pasted below.

But it didn't really convey any news other than "I'm not dead yet". Maybe someone with better reading comprehension / oiji board skills than myself can tell me the big news contained herein.

https://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2025/10/01/cary-sas-ipo-artificial-intelligence-jim-goodnight.html?csrc=6398&link_source=ta_first_comment&taid=68dd33f5f5bfd20001db1ca5&utm_campaign=trueAnthemTrendingContent&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwY2xjawNKGhNleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETF2TjlLWTBPNkVMemtjSTVqAR4ptyAs0Oqrk0jB8Avtwg6Yn4gzNVt2NUmMQ7DHkhkNkRMMz-rESj4DEqAnXw_aem_x82wTJAKJiP9R3P3_STGfQ

1000 shares each? Beat award equivalent to 50 dollars? Snickers bar?

https://www.citybiz.co/article/741606/national-veterinary-associates-names-john-g-bruno-as-chief-executive-officer

Here's an IPO to stay away from!