Pieter's message to employees
June 12, 2018
To everyone on the Adyen team,
Tomorrow, Adyen will be a listed company.
Eleven years ago, we processed our first transaction. That same year, we also raised our first capital from external investors.
Tomorrow, we will issue no new shares – all we will really do is welcome on board new shareholders and give existing, external, shareholders the flexibility that they are looking for. We could have pursued alternative means of offering this flexibility, such as a partial sale to a private equity shareholder, or a strategic sale of the company. We decided against that as we want to build the company for the long term. This path will allow us to do just that – as an independent company.
We won’t be ringing the bell – or sounding the gong – tomorrow. While it’s definitely important to celebrate successes, investor liquidity is not something we celebrate. It does in itself not impact Adyen. That’s why everyone will be in the office tomorrow – working. This process has proven to be a minimal distraction to the company, which is a great testament to the work put in.
We celebrate other things, because we’re passionate about other things: new merchants that we board, new functionality that we build and new regions that we unlock. Those are worth celebrating. And we are passionate about protecting the freedom within Adyen - the trust we put in each other is what makes us excel.
Although I am proud that we are now in the position to list on the public market – there are other aspects of Adyen that I am far more proud of. I’m proud of being able to work with this talented team, with the Adyen Formula in mind. I’m proud of our commercial success, of the quality of our engineers, of our systems and of our execution.
Every year, we acknowledge the work we have put in and throw a party and celebrate with everyone from our 15 offices around the world – like we did last Friday.
Tomorrow will put us on a larger stage. A stage that you deserve. I feel very lucky to be building Adyen together with all of you. I’m sure that we will look back at this in the future and realize that this was only the beginning.
The IPO will only help us to continue to do what we are doing now: helping our merchants grow and reshaping the payments industry.
Thank you for being on this journey together. This has proven to be a lot of fun.
Pieter