The Tech IPO Playbook Is Missing Half Its Audience
Retail participation has exploded and transformed public markets. But you'd never know it from the current "best practices" for public offerings. Here's how to change that.
The 2026 IPO season appears to still be on despite everything else in the world working against it. SpaceX is now on file confidentially for what will likely be the largest IPO ever. OpenAI is cutting side quests and getting its business into fighting shape while building CFO Sarah Friar’s public profile. Anthropic, Stripe, and Databricks might be joining the party too. Renaissance Capital estimates 200 to 230 IPOs in 2026, raising $40 to $60 billion.
So it’s time to start talking about the comms side of IPOs again. I have personal history here, having been on the team that took Twitter public. The playbook for companies was pretty simple then: don’t jump the gun, get institutional investors comfortable with your story and your management, have a clean listing day free of drama, smile as you ring the bell.
The information sphere around markets and business was relatively simple, too: CNBC and Bloomberg for TV, a handful of outlets plus wires for the business press, maybe a few trades. Retail investors were a rounding error, and their stock trades still cost money to execute.1
That was 13 years ago. The market and the media have transformed. But as far as I can tell from my conversations with those who work on and have been through recent IPOs, the playbook still hasn’t.
The Retail Revolution Isn’t Just Meme Stocks
Retail investors now regularly account for nearly 20% of daily U.S. equity trading volume, up from low single digits before COVID. On high-volume days, that goes up to roughly 40% of equity volume and up to 50% of options volume. During the first half of 2025, individual investors poured $1.3 billion per day into the markets, a 32.6% year-over-year increase, with record net inflows of $155.3 billion.
The ownership numbers are just as striking. The typical S&P 500 company has direct retail ownership in the low-to-mid twenties, percentage-wise. A lot of the biggest names in tech are well above that baseline. Apple at roughly 34%. Palantir: 35%. Tesla: 29%, which on roughly 3.2 billion shares outstanding means more than a billion shares in individual hands. Amazon: 25%.
The information ecosystem serving these investors has flipped entirely. FINRA’s 2024 investor survey found that YouTube is now the most-used social platform for investment information, and is relied on by 61% of investors under 35. r/WallStreetBets went from 100,000 members in 2016 to more than 13 million.
And there’s a generational tailwind that makes all of this look modest: approximately $120 trillion will transfer to millennials and Gen Z over the next 20 years. Retail participation could get much, much bigger.
Enter the Stock Stans
The most engaged retail investors don’t function like, sound like, or behave like “shareholders.” They’re more like online fandoms. This shift is behavioral and cultural.
I’m calling them Stock Stans.
These are individual investors whose relationship to a stock is identity, not just investment. They build their thesis around it, argue about it online, create content evangelizing it, recruit their friends into it, and treat attacks on the company like personal affronts. Think Taylor Swift’s Swifties or BTS’s ARMY, but with brokerage accounts. Organized, vocal, fiercely protective, and loyal through the rough patches in a way fair-weather followers never are.
“Bang-up job, Jim, you discovered meme stocks five years late,” you say. But while Stock Stans are certainly involved in meme-y tickers, what’s novel now is every major stock now has them.
Costco (~30% retail ownership) shareholders treat the stock the way they treat their Costco membership: as a lifestyle commitment. The customer-shareholder overlap is nearly total, the buy-the-dip conviction is fierce, and the community discusses earnings and hot dog prices with equal intensity.
During Disney’s 2024 proxy fight, 75% of its retail shareholders (~33% of the company) voted to support the board against Nelson Peltz. Retail proxy participation is typically dismal, but Disney’s individual holders showed up and were near-unanimous. That constituency existed because Disney is the kind of company people feel they belong to, not just own.
The phenomenon scales up from there. Palantir’s 2025 is the upside case. Wall Street said overvalued, but Palantir had spent years cultivating its retail base: Alex Karp’s unfiltered public persona, earnings calls that close with a direct address to individual investors, a mission-driven narrative (”strengthening the West”) that gives stans something to believe in, not just bet on. When institutional skepticism hit, the stans held, bought dips, and made the bull case on social media to an audience sell-side research could never reach. The stock surged more than 150%.
CoreWeave’s 2025 IPO shows what happens when you fail to account for the power of retail. Enthusiasm for the AI narrative drove the stock from a $40 IPO price to $187 by June. But CoreWeave had enthusiasm without narrative infrastructure: no executive social presence, no mission narrative beyond “GPU cloud,” no relationship with the retail investors buying its stock. When institutional concerns emerged (62% revenue concentration in a single customer, significant debt), retail had no framework to evaluate them and no reason to believe. The stock lost more than half its value from its peak.
Both companies faced institutional headwinds. One had spent years cultivating stans with conviction. The other had cheap heat it couldn’t sustain.
RoaringKitty‘s DNA got spliced with NYSE and NASDAQ’s, and now the evolutionary trait is everywhere, permanently. And I don’t think any companies heading into an IPO, save for SpaceX2, have the slightest idea how to harness it.
Updating the Playbook
Stock Stan communities will form around your IPO whether you build for them or not. They’re already assembling on Twitter, Reddit, Discord, and TikTok around every company in that pipeline. The only variable is whether you have any influence over the narrative they construct, and to what business end. Textbook communications challenge.
To be clear: nobody wants to be a meme stock. The opportunity is more specific and more durable than that: an informed base of committed individual shareholders who provide downside resilience in selloffs, amplification in the information sphere, and governance support when it counts. Not a mob. A constituency.
One company has actually figured this out, and unless you’re a complete corporate governance savant, you will never guess it. The paragon of progressive investor relations and corporate comms thinking is... ExxonMobil.
They’ve created a dedicated “Individual shareholders“ section as a top-level IR navigation item, with plain-language business explainers and introductory videos. They’ve also created a first-of-its-kind Voluntary Retail Voting Program in consultation with the SEC that lets individual shareholders pre-authorize their shares to be voted in line with board recommendations. An oil company built the retail investor infrastructure that the world’s most dynamic, forward-thinking economic sector hasn’t thought to build.
So why hasn’t anyone else?
The institutional pricing mechanism works. The roadshow exists for defensible reasons. Brunswick Group published a piece last month calling retail investors a “market force,” and they’re right. But the reckoning has happened at the thought leadership level. It hasn’t filtered down to the IPO process or the comms execution surrounding it. The gap isn’t the IPO event, but everything around it: the IR infrastructure, the narrative strategy, the post-listing engagement model. All still built for one audience.
Every structural incentive in the advisory ecosystem works against closing that gap. Investment bankers still get paid on institutional allocations. The standard IPO retail allocation remains roughly 10% of shares, even though retail already owns 30-60% of comparable companies post-IPO. Securities lawyers remain incentivized to minimize novelty. Communications advisors like Brunswick calcify around “best practices” from a decade ago (which, to be fair, were best practices a decade ago).
I audited the IR websites of more than 25 major public tech companies to see how deep the inertia runs. Not one has a page, a section, or even a paragraph designed for individual investors. Tesla, Palantir, Coinbase, Robinhood: companies with massive retail followings, or whose entire businesses depend on retail investors, all running the same institutional template built by the same two IR platform software vendors.3
A Forward-Thinking IPO Comms Approach
If you’re heading communications for a tech company approaching an IPO (or advising one), here’s what needs to change.
Establish retail-facing communications practices before the quiet period makes them impossible. This isn’t “your CEO should do business podcasts”. That’s general comms advice any firm would give you today. Retail-oriented communications for a still-private company means building specific practices that serve an audience with different information needs than institutional investors. Your CEO regularly explaining the business and its decisions in plain language on platforms where retail investors actually gather. A company content practice that makes the business intelligible to non-analysts—not thought leadership, but “here’s what we do and why it matters”—in terms a future retail shareholder can follow. Visual communication designed for screenshots and sharing, not just roadshow decks. Two-way engagement on the platforms that will become your Stock Stan communities.
Some of the smartest IPO candidates have already been building this muscle. Stripe publishes an annual letter disclosing some business metrics, but it’s mostly a Berkshire-style narrative-driven communication designed to be read by anyone. OpenAI’s CFO Sarah Friar has been publishing financial milestones on the company blog in plain language. Databricks disclosed crossing $4.8B ARR timed to its fundraise. These companies are establishing a pattern of voluntary, plain-language financial communication while still private. When the quiet period arrives, that pattern already exists.
Design your IPO materials for two audiences. Retail investors will read your S-1. The question is which parts they latch onto, and whether you’ve given them something to work with or left them to find the scariest-sounding risk factor on their own. Robinhood’s comms team didn’t choose for Reddit to fixate on the 80% payment-for-order-flow revenue disclosure. CoreWeave’s team didn’t choose for the 62% Microsoft concentration stat to become the bear case. Those were the most legible, surprising facts in the filing, and retail made them the story by default. Think about your materials through the lens of what’s most legible and shareable, and whether the narrative retail constructs from your filing is the one you’d choose.
Airbnb came close to getting this right. The prospectus summary outlined the company’s narrative arc, explained its reason for being, and laid out why hosts partner with them. But the rest of the S-1 was the standard perfunctory layout of the business in Wall Street terms. Write the business overview so it’s intelligible to someone who’ll never build a DCF model. Or even better than writing, illustrate it. Make growth charts that work on a phone screen. Give the stans something to go to work with. The SEC dictates a lot, but they don’t dictate that you be boring.
Broaden who the roadshow is for. The traditional roadshow is a series of private meetings with institutional investors. Retail investors, who will own a significant chunk of the company within months, have no real access to the story, the management team, or the narrative framework that informs institutional investment decisions. What they do get is a hastily produced equivalent of a public-access TV version of the roadshow with the CEO and CFO talking over institutional slides for 30 minutes, posted because the SEC says you more or less have to. The vendor ecosystem for this output markets a smooth process and on-time delivery, not breakthrough content. The quality bar is on the floor.4
A company that invested real creative energy here — a retail-facing version of the roadshow narrative designed for the person who’ll never sit in a Goldman conference room — would have zero competition. The story you tell institutional investors should be accessible to the people buying shares on Robinhood. The platform to deliver it already exists. Someone just has to actually try.
Build the IR infrastructure nobody else in tech has. A dedicated retail investor section on your IR site that treats them like first-class citizens, like ExxonMobil5. Not a transfer-agent FAQ, but a real, plain-language explanation of your business and results designed for the social-first environment where your retail shareholders actually live. And maintain it after listing. This can’t be an IPO-day stunt or token nod. Persistent infrastructure that treats retail investors as a constituency worth an ongoing conversation, not a checkbox.
And now a word for my securities lawyer friends: Put down your pitchforks. I can hear you already.
Reg FD. Selective disclosure. Quiet period. Gun-jumping. Real constraints. But the legal boundaries seem wider than most practitioners assume.6 Reg FD and the quiet period are two separate legal regimes that most comms professionals conflate. The JOBS Act and its 2019 extension loosened pre-IPO communications significantly. The SEC’s 2013 Netflix investigation established social media as a valid Reg FD disclosure channel. Rule 421(b) requires plain-English prospectuses. The line is clear: building general corporate reputation is permitted; conditioning the market for a specific offering is not.
The standard guidance from firms like Wilson Sonsini is “do not begin new communications practices” during the IPO process. Sound advice, and it creates an imperative most companies miss: establish retail-facing practices well before the IPO is on the horizon, so they’re a documented pattern of behavior, not a novel initiative your lawyers have to evaluate during the process. The legal framework doesn’t argue against building for retail. It argues for building for retail early. (It’s worth noting what firms like Wilson Sonsini haven’t published: any guidance on how retail’s growth changes the IPO communications calculus. The most-cited academic treatment of the retail revolution, by Penn Law’s Jill Fisch, argues that the regulatory posture should be facilitation, not restriction. The law firms haven’t caught up to the law professors, which is delicious irony.)
No major tech company does any of this today. It’s an open goal.
Everything I’ve said above is easier to state from my outside position. I’m not Sarah Friar trying to land the plane of a likely-trillion-dollar OpenAI IPO, with all the attendant pressure and responsibility that entails. I’m not running a sprawling global corporate comms advisory with non-tech clients who might get spooked by what the weirdos in Silicon Valley are trying.
But the biggest, most in-demand companies also have the most license to do things differently, and in doing so set new standards that obviate a generation of stale best practices. The stans are already assembling. The only question is who shows up to meet them.
And really, do you want to get out-innovated by an oil company?
$8.95 per trade on Schwab. Absolutely wild to think back to now.
SpaceX now owns Twitter and is run by the most terminally online man in human history, so they may have accidentally solved this problem through sheer force of posting.
Q4 Inc. and Nasdaq IR Solutions power the vast majority of public company IR sites, tech or otherwise.
I’m reminded of the Beavis and Butt-Head bit when they’re watching the music video for Pavement’s Rattled by the Rush, and Beavis, frustrated with the band’s slacker ethos, screams at the TV "Start it over and this time try!” That’s the kind of elder millennial reference you’re only getting here, folks.
Yes, I’m still as surprised as you are that I’m writing this. But really, hats off to the IR and corporate comms team there.
I’m not a lawyer, don’t even play one on TV, this is not legal advice, informational purposes only, consult an attorney.
Jim, well said and I agree there's a big opportunity for both IPO candidates and established public to do much more to attract and keep retail investors. With respect, I think companies are doing more than you reflect here - and at Brunswick we've long prioritized retail investor engagement as part of our IPO and IR best practices, which we have continued to evolve and update over the past decade.
Some examples we've seen or helped with in include: Alibaba pioneering the use of infographics in their F-1 prospectus to simply explain their structure and business model, which is now standard practice; Coinbase's Brian Armstrong and Alicia Haas doing a Reddit AMA just before listing; extensive use of retail-investor focused news platforms like Sherwood News and the Schwab Network. And of course, establishing a robust body of content explaining the business on the company's owned channels well ahead of the quiet period. Not to mention developing a clear and compelling video for posting on RetailRoadshow.
I agree that the traditional IR website (and also earnings announcement process) is begging to be reinvented. But I wouldn't base a conclusion about whether companies are engaging retail investors sufficiently primarily on the state of their IR sites -- there's lots more effective ways to go about it. -Darren McDermott, Partner, Brunswick Group
I enjoyed this, thanks for writing. The one note I'd make - Palantir, at least, doesn't have a big owned presence for retail investors on its site because it engages with them in other forums (Twitter, etc). So I'd add to your advice to be mindful of where your retail investors congregate and don't be afraid to go to them directly.