How much should a public-company CEO's job be about the stock price and investors versus the underlying business?

Tobi Lütke · Apr 3, 2023

The stock price is not the company; the stock market is a meta-guessing game about what others guess the fair market value is, and has nothing to do with the actual value of a business

The real fair market value is the sum of products and skill sets of people, most of which is extraordinarily hard to value from a GAAP perspective; traders are playing a guessing game about each other's guesses, so it's Wall Street playing Wall Street

Scope: unless you are actually selling shares

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Woody Marshall · Oct 11, 2023

Newly public CEOs should ignore the noise and focus on the business, because ultimate valuation is determined only by performance against guidance

The public market wants to see whether a new CEO understands the business, communicates well, and delivers against guidance; that is what sets the valuation over time

Scope: accepts the stock will be volatile

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Dominik Richter · Dec 1, 2023

Daily share price moves are randomness and macro factors rather than information about the business, so teams shouldn't read them as a verdict on the company.

The company is the same company from one day to the next, as in Buffett's hamburger analogy where a lower price is good news for a buyer; what counts is whether the business is better than it was, and in almost every domain HelloFresh is better today than twelve months ago.

Scope: employees checking the price is most intense right after going public

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Yamini Rangan · Mar 18, 2025

A public company CEO must hold deep conviction and act on it as if not running a public company, and counterintuitive decisions are even better

Investors actually appreciate conviction in the business and respond to the story behind the decisions

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Maor Shlomo · Nov 24, 2025

Public market stock behavior does not reflect what is actually happening inside a business

Markets fluctuate heavily and only respond to consistent results over time

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Eran Zinman · Mar 2, 2026

Leaders should ignore the noise — Twitter, press articles, even the public market — and focus on the essence of the business

The essence is simple: this is the biggest software opportunity of our lifetime, the company must change, and execution is the only thing within his control

Scope: framed as what works for him as a CEO under pressure

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Eran Zinman · Mar 2, 2026

CEOs must decouple their sense of personal success from stock sentiment and judge themselves on business metrics — revenue, retention, execution — in both up and down cycles

If you don't praise yourself when the stock is high, you won't be crushed when it's low; the 2021 COVID run-up was just as much a cycle as today's drawdown

60:24 20VC: Monday.com CEO on Is SaaS Dead: Will Everything Be Vibe Coded | Will Systems of Record Become Valueless Databases in an Agentic World | Will LLMs Own the Value in the Application Layer with Eran Zinman

Tobias Lütke · May 4, 2026

The stock ticker has nothing to do with the company you are building — it is other people's guess at future fair market value, while the CEO's job is to work on actual fair market value

The stock roughly doubled at the beginning of COVID and they had not become 100% smarter at that moment, showing the ticker tracks others' assumptions rather than the underlying business

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Avishai Abrahami · Jul 13, 2026

A CEO should detach from the share price and focus only on what he can control — the business itself.

He cannot influence the macro narrative or what people think, so the only useful focus is the problems still to be solved — the same whether the stock is up 20% or down 20%.

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Avishai Abrahami · Jul 13, 2026

A CEO cannot meaningfully manage to 'the stock market' because it is millions of people with different opinions; the job is to build a great company and balance obligations to shareholders, customers and employees

There is no single stock market entity to talk to or listen to, so the actionable duty is to customers and employees as well as investors

Scope: says the obligations are not in conflict and should be balanced

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Vlad Tenev · Jul 14, 2025

It is especially hard for Robinhood's CEO to ignore the company's stock price because the product itself surfaces stock prices constantly

Using his own product pushes stock prices into his brain

5:01 Using your own product keeps stock price top of mind for the ceo

Tobias Lütke · May 4, 2026

In undifferentiated commodity businesses like gold mining, the CEO's real product is investor relations, not the commodity

With no product differentiation, a slightly higher multiple than rival mines lets you buy them and consolidate, so charisma and IR are the actual technology

50:29 In commodity businesses investor relations is the product

Daniel Dines · Dec 18, 2024

Stock price matters — not for personal wealth but because it determines what you can build and the talent you can attract, and it affects employee morale

You have responsibilities in the world; you're part of a much bigger game than your own spending

46:31 Stock price matters instrumentally for talent and morale not personal wealth