Rather than Peter Pan, how about "Forever Young"?*
A very sharp piece from Chris Guo at his Soft Currency substack, January 28:
A Case Study on the 17 Year-old Startup That Refuses to IPO
....MUCH MOREThere is a strange species of company in Silicon Valley. They’re famous. They’re worth billions. They employ the smartest people on earth. And they share one defining characteristic: They refuse to grow up.
I call them Peter Pan Companies:
Take the autonomous vehicle platform, Waymo. Born in 2009, Waymo is a 17 year-old “startup.” In human years, it should be driving itself to prom. In startup years, it should be a grumpy public company issuing dividends and battling short sellers. Instead, it is living in its parents’ basement (Alphabet), and asking for a larger allowance (a new $15B round at a $100B valuation).
Or take OpenAI. It burns $8 billion a year, lives in Microsoft’s guest house, and its CEO has “0% interest” in getting a real job (IPO).
The Three Dangers of the Peter Pan Economy
If this sounds vaguely like the plot of an endearingly ridiculous rom-com starring Matthew McConaughey, you might find this analogy risible. But if you are operating in the new tech economy, here’s why a 17-year old company that fails to launch is not a joke.
First, for employees like engineers and product managers, Peter Pan companies are Talent Black Holes. They hoard the top 1% of talent by offering Soft Currency (paper equity in a $100B company) that may never be liquid. You need to understand this dynamic during interviews and separate monopoly money (paper equity with no realistic exit) from equity that will actually turn into wealth.
Second, for founders and CEOs, Peter Pan companies distort the Laws of Business Physics. They release products at unnaturally subsidized prices. If you try to compete with their pricing or feature set, you will go bankrupt (cough - Argo AI, Uber ATG, Embark Trucks, TuSimple US, list goes on…) You need to identify which competitors are real businesses (must make a profit) and which are strategic hobbies (can burn cash forever), because you cannot fight a hobbyist with a P&L.
Finally, for VCs and investors, these companies set a False Market Tempo. When OpenAI raises at 100x revenue, it convinces your portfolio founders that scale is all that matters. This leads to a generation of startups burning cash to hit vanity metrics that public markets no longer care about. You need to spot the Peter Pan traits early so you don’t accidentally fund a copycat that doesn’t have a rich parent.
To illustrate exactly how these Peter Pan traits manifest, we have exclusive access to a strictly confidential (and definitely real) memo from the Waymo leadership team to their anxious employees.
CONFIDENTIAL // INTERNAL USE ONLY
From: The Office of the Co-CEOs
To: All Waymonauts (Full Time & Contractors)
Date: January 26, 2026
Subject: REFLECTIONS: The Road to 1 Million (and Beyond)
Team,
As we approach our 17th year of revolutionizing mobility (one geofenced block at a time), it is truly humbling to see how far we’ve come. We are officially on track to hit 1 million paid weekly trips, up from 450k just a few months ago. The expansion into San Diego is live, and seeing our Jaguars navigate the complex coastal terrain of North County is a testament to everything we’ve built.
However, during yesterday’s All-Hands, it was clear based on the Dory upvotes that one question remains top of mind: “When is the IPO?”
We want to address this directly, with the transparency and intellectual honesty that defines our culture.
On The Timeline
Many of you have pointed out that in 2015, we predicted a driverless world by 2020. You ask, “Why are we still in Early Access mode in 2026?”
It is important to remember that mobility is an asymptotic curve. Solving the first 99% of driving (cruising in sunny Phoenix) was the easy part. The final 1%, the long tail of construction cones, erratic pedestrians in hoodies, and heavy rain, is infinitely complex.
This requires patience, capital, and a refusal to release a product that is merely “good enough” (unlike some competitors we won’t name).
On Our Evolving Team
We also want to acknowledge the bittersweet departures of some of our longest-tenured colleagues this quarter. To the members of the Early Guard who are moving on to new adventures: we salute you.
While it is true that we have successfully rotated out the original 2009 team, and 2016 team, the pioneers who built the prototype are not always the best suited to polish the fleet. We are entering a new phase of Operational Excellence, and your fresh energy is exactly what we need to steward this asset for the next decade.
On Our Relationship with Alphabet
Finally, let us be crystal clear about a rumor circulating on Blind: Waymo is an independent company. We are not merely a data collection subsidiary for Google.
That said, our partnership with Alphabet remains our greatest strategic advantage. As part of our Synergistic Intelligence Initiative, please continue to prioritize all bulk data requests from our siblings at Google DeepMind.
When the Gemini team asks for “high-fidelity Lidar scans of pedestrian interactions,” it is not because we are training their models. Ensuring that our data flows seamlessly into their training clusters is critical to our shared mission… collaborating on safety.
So, let’s keep our eyes on the road. The public markets will be there when we are ready. In the meantime, we have the most enviable runway in the history of Silicon Valley.
Let’s go get that million.
The Leadership Team
Waymo // A Subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.
How to Spot a Peter Pan Company
Whether you are investing multiple years of your life as an employee, your own money as a founder, or your reputation as a VC, you need to be able to kick the tires on a company.
Here is the 3-point inspection guide, using Waymo as an illustrative example.
1. The Broken Assumptions Check
No company raises billions without someone smart making some back-of-the-envelope assumptions that promise eventual profit and justify the burn.1
For Waymo, this intellectual air cover came from Burns/Jordan at the Earth Institute (Columbia University), which calculated the unit economics in terms of cost-per-mile from removing the driver (labor) and switching to electric propulsion (lower maintenance/fuel). It was a rigorous mathematical argument that a collectivist utopia of shared autonomous vehicles is cheaper than the 100-year-old model of selling private cars to individuals so they can keep their smelly gym sneakers in the trunk.
And from a RethinkX Report (Seba and Arbib 2017), which used a trademarked “Disruption Framework,” essentially a proprietary term for extrapolating two lines on a graph, to predict falling technology costs (Wright’s Law) and swift adoption of Transport-as-a-Service....
*Here's Alphaville:
Apparently water and gravity are key ingredients in the Peter Pan lifestyle/(non-) life-cycle.
