From Garage to Wall Street
The corporate lifecycle & IPOs
Every public company you can buy today started as an idea in someone's head. Apple in a garage in Los Altos. Amazon in a Bellevue garage with two pine doors as desks.
Google in a Stanford dorm room. The path from idea to a stock you can buy on your phone runs through a predictable sequence of funding rounds and a single, transformative day called the IPO. Understanding that path helps you read what's left of a company's growth runway when you finally meet it as a public-market investor.
Most beginners assume a company is a company is a company. It isn't. A business at twelve months old, ten employees, no revenue, and a slide deck is a fundamentally different animal from one at twenty years old, fifty thousand employees, and twenty billion dollars of cash on the balance sheet.
That is the opening. Finishing a lesson is where it stops being interesting and starts being useful: the full lesson runs to 8 sections and ends with 5 practice questions. A free account is what opens the rest, and the other 255 lessons in the Academy with it. No card.
What this lesson covers
- 1The funding stages, in plain language
- 2Where the returns live — and where they don't
- 3IPO mechanics — pricing, lock-ups, and dilution
- 4Funding Stage Timeline
- 5Famous IPOs — what happened on day one and since (verify current price on the platform)
- 6Amazon, May 1997 — what an IPO buyer actually got
- 7Where to see this on the platform
- 8Summary