You can’t overstate the reverberations a Stripe initial public offering—or even the glimmer of one—would have on startup investing. As my colleagues reported today, the payment software company has told employees it plans to go public or allow them to sell stock in the next year.

I doubt even a looming deadline for early stock awards could force the Collison brothers—Patrick and John, Stripe’s founders—to brave one of the worst IPO markets in more than a decade. More likely, Stripe will opt to give employees the liquidity they want through a big secondary offering sometime soon. If the company also decides to sell new shares to venture capital investors—a path that could help it delay an IPO even further—firms will still line up for access to the round, assuming Stripe offers a pretty heavily discounted valuation.

Stripe’s elongated path to an IPO shows how employees can lose big when a company, buoyed by investments from private investors, pushes off going public. The 12-year-old company has offered some employees opportunities to liquidate their shares over the years, but Stripe’s board has historically been very controlling of the process, requiring approval for each sale.

These employees would have made a lot more money had Stripe gone public two years ago. There was a time in 2021 when secondary market investors offered bids so high for Stripe stock, they implied a valuation of $225 billion for the company. True, it might never have sold shares to the public at what now seems like a ridiculous valuation. But the IPO valuation would surely have been a lot higher than it would be if Stripe went public today.