I was at Facebook for its IPO, and I can tell Anthropic is not ready to go public

I was at Facebook for its IPO, and I can tell Anthropic is not ready to go public Brian Boland worked at Facebook during its 2012 initial public offering. Courtesy of Brian Boland This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Brian Boland, a former Facebook vice president who witnessed its 2012 initial public offering and the aftermath during his 11-year career at the social media company. He left in 2020. Meta, which operates Facebook, declined to comment. Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider. The following has been edited for length and clarity.I've worked at a few different places in tech, starting at a digital ad agency that was eventually acquired by Google, and joining Microsoft. All the way to eventually joining Facebook.I got to really go through a journey where, over 11 years that felt like a lifetime, I saw the way that the different forces of being a public company changed how everything operated.There was a belief that nothing would change. There was a belief that we knew who we are, and we had a mission, and so we would just stay focused on the mission.You believe your own rhetoric. And you believe the stories that you're telling each other, and you really believe that you're going to be completely different.Facebook had to persuade investors up until its IPOThe lead-up to the IPO was a lot of excitement. There was a lot of feeling like the company had accomplished some great goals.People were really eager to see what would happen. The crazy hiccup came a couple weeks prior to going public when the guy who was the CMO of General Motors did a public statement that he was pulling all of his ad spend because he didn't believe the ads on Facebook worked.It created a huge fire drill. So the market quickly became concerned about whether Facebook ads work. Is this going to be — since the entire business model is predicated on ads — is this a listing that doesn't support the facts?And so, there's a scramble over those couple of weeks to help tell the stories from advertisers. The night before the IPO, everyone was on campus. It was a buzz. People stayed overnight. We did a hackathon.One of the guys who I worked with spent the evening brewing beer. He was outside cooking down all the things you cook down when you're brewing beer, and he bottled it as the IPO IPA.The stock price is more important than we realizedThere really was a focus on "business as usual" — that nothing is going to be different the day after the IPO than it was the day before, that this is the kind of thing that a company is, essentially, required to do once you get big enough.It's not that simple, and you start to see things like I saw, where, when the stock price doesn't do as well, you are quickly reminded that when you are recruiting talent, when you're hiring engineers, you pay them in stock.So suddenly, you care about stock price. You care about it because you want to acquire and grow. You care about it because you want to hire talent. And suddenly the stock price that you said you didn't care about becomes a central feature of how you're going to grow the business, and so it becomes something you pay a lot of attention to.When we went public and realized that revenue growth was critical for the business, it became something that Mark mandated.Mark said that every team that has a surface now carries a revenue goal. And so instead of just being growth goals, or product shipping goals, or performance goals, they now had a number.The mission gave way to revenue growthAt the beginning, I think we did a really good job of prioritizing the experience of people, and then over time that just degraded as pressures for revenue grew.The secret trick of Silicon Valley is they use the mission to justify the rest. And the idea that you talk yourself into is, "Well, of course we have to have revenue growing at this pace and at this rate so we can support a share price that supports the mission." Rather than saying, "Okay, specifically what are the things that we're doing that drive the mission?"If you look at a lot of the goals, they're around product growth; they're around revenue growth. They're not about measuring whether we made the world more open and connected. They're not about whether we gave people the power to build community, and whether they actually built those communities.Anthropic could echo Facebook's mistakesWith the Anthropic IPO, I see history repeating itself in some ways, and I actually see it as pretty reckless in other ways.I've never seen an S-1 that devotes so much of its time talking about how dangerous its products could be.If you have all of the attention and mindshare and investments in team hiring going into the growth side, the safety side gets neglected. And the teams that you want to be building up to protect people from those harms become an afterthought and a distraction to the main goal of growth.It's a situation where the CEO, Dario Amodei, is saying we need to slow down, and even a year would buy us the ability to build much safer products — at the same time as they're rushing to put out an IPO this month.Facebook could and should have invested far more in safety than it did. And it grew revenue at the expense of safety. It chased the dollar rather than chasing protecting people. So, that's the thing I see echoing in this IPO that concerns me.Anthropic should not go public yetThere's so many red flags here that I'm not saying never go public, but I'm certainly saying not now. Not until you get the safety side of the story really squared away, and slow down. And then not until we have a much clearer financial picture, and understand the circular nature of the economies here.I think that as a society we should expect that companies, when they are going to go public, and they're going to be included in everyone's index fund, that there's a basic level of expectations.They should have very clear, audited, robust financials that everyone can understand. They should have a picture for profitability that the markets can fairly price, and they should not be so risky that they're uninsurable.A delayed IPO would give Anthropic time to answer questionsSlowing down gives us time to build in the safety protocols. When we slow down, we can also have expectations around audited financials. And we can have expectations on disclosure of circular investments. We can have expectations around debt on the balance sheet.The stakes are so high that there's no reason for us not to put these in place.I'm not anti-AI. I use AI all the time. I think there are incredible uses for these tools. We don't need to do it at the pace we're doing it.I think that they probably are the best of the bunch. But they're not doing enough. And that's all that matters to me, is how do we ensure that we don't do something that we regret as a society?I don't think it's a crazy ask. It feels like a basic ask. And so investors should be vocal. Because if things continue at the rate they are and eventually this stuff collapses, that hits every investor in the market. Read next Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know Stephen is a senior tech reporter at Business Insider, covering OpenAI, Anthropic and the ecosystem around the leading artificial intelligence companies.Previously he covered technology at SFGATE, and has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Information and CNBC. He studied journalism and economics at Northwestern University.His work has earned an SF Press Club Investigative Reporting Award and, in 2025, SPJ NorCal’s Excellence in Journalism Award for Technology Reporting.Stephen lives in San Francisco. Contact him via email at scouncil@businessinsider.com, or on Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp at 415-757-8198. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely. as told to Anthropic Meta More Facebook AI Markets Mark Zuckerberg IPO Artificial Intelligence Investing