This week’s Instacart IPO is a big milestone for the tech industry. It’s the first major, venture-backed consumer tech company to hit the public markets since the end of 2021, when interest rates were still low. Other late-stage tech firms that have been delaying their listings, such as Reddit, are closely watching how public investors react to Instacart’s growth story to determine if the IPO window is truly open or not.  

It’s also a milestone for Instacart’s roughly 3,500 full-time employees, some of whom are earning generational wealth for making an early bet on a little grocery delivery startup many years ago. For those who joined Instacart in the last few years, things are more complicated.

Joining a startup at the earliest stage gives someone the potential to earn the most outsized upside from the stock. In the case of Instacart, I found this analysis by Billy Gallagher at Prospect (a firm that tries to model the potential growth of private tech stocks) to be illuminating.