The Road to IPO: Danielle Crane, Chief People Officer at OneStream

Twelve years since its founding, OneStream’s journey reached a high point with its IPO in July 2024 — a testament to the company’s growth and resilience in a tough market. Despite years of uncertainty, this IPO highlights what’s possible with the right leadership.

Chief People Officer Danielle Crane is one of those leaders. She joined OneStream in June 2020 when the company was focused on building out a strong people function to develop repeatable processes for talent recruitment and management. OneStream always knew an IPO was one of many potential outcomes, but the market essentially closed down for two years during the pandemic. 

However, Danielle and the team spent this valuable extra preparation time to invest in, build, and scale best-in-class G&A functions so they would be ready when the market opened back up. Specifically, Danielle’s team spent a lot of time on tightening up their people operations and data integrity, including building out their Human Resource Information System (HRIS) to consolidate existing processes into a single source of truth for their organization. 

In an “ask me anything” conversation with The Circle, Danielle shared her scar tissue and learnings, including the signals her team looked for to determine they were ready to go public, how her priorities shifted on the road to an IPO, and lessons from standardizing  the company’s compensation structure for public life. 

Look for Important Signals That  Your Company is IPO Ready

You’ve built predictability in your financial results: OneStream knew that when it went public, the market wanted to see stability in its earnings and forecasts. “The last thing you want to do is go into the public markets and not understand how your business will perform,” she said. When you have repeatability in your financial results, that is a strong sign of IPO preparedness. 

“We practiced a lot to go public. For the year before our IPO, we held mock quarterly earnings calls and learned from them. We built the muscle and the machine, and saw the progression with each quarter. We truly got ready to respond to life as a public company.” – Danielle Crane, Chief People Officer, OneStream

Your key executives are locked in to avoid unnecessary leadership disruption post-IPO.

When you are a growth stage company, roles can sometimes be an all-hands-on-deck scenario where people are working hybrid roles, picking up slack between jobs, or have done one part of a job for so long they are the de facto person for it, even if it isn’t their specialty. When your company goes public, it is time to evaluate whether your key executives have the right skills set, and to identify any gaps in your C-Suite. “We brought in a CMO before we went public because we knew that role was critical for storytelling as a public company and we needed a unique skill set for it,” said Danielle. And the timing of the new hires is key: You want to evaluate the team you have in place well ahead of an exit because it might take six to 12 months to hire and onboard someone – and you won’t have time to hire them during the IPO process.  

Prepare for Big Shifts in Your Role and Company Culture 

One unique aspect about an IPO journey is that a small group of people in your organization will carry most of the brunt of the work. “Unlike a lot of the major projects and initiatives across the company that are highly visible, we have this whole new job we can’t tell anyone about, in addition to our day job,” said Danielle. 

This new work will impact your day-to-day responsibilities. 

“What I didn’t prepare for was what we needed to do with my own team. All of a sudden, 70% of my day shifted to something else. I have a great team who could handle the change, but it was still a big shift for all of us.” – Danielle Crane, CPO, OneStream

One thing that got the OneStream G&A project team through the pressure cooker of IPO readiness: they held twice daily stand-ups to review all the moving pieces together in real time. “Those meetings became a safe group space to discuss the challenging aspects of juggling the IPO process,” said Danielle, 

The IPO is a mile marker, not a finish line: “There is understandably so much focus on taking a company public, but you’re not exactly relieved once you are public because now there is a whole new body of work. Your job as a People leader changes a lot,” said Danielle. “But because I had been practicing the new rhythms before we went public, I was warmed up and prepared for those changes.” 

Prepare to shift cultural expectations around transparency: “We had to educate the leadership team and the company as a whole about the level of transparency we could have as a public company,” said Danielle. “There were certain pieces of information that the organization was used to receiving that we could no longer provide as we got closer to public life. We spent two days with our executives coaching them on how they can talk about our business, both internally and externally.” 

Compensation: Standardize, Standardize, Standardize

Establish Well-Defined Compensation Practices Investors Can Easily Understand: About 18 months ahead of your IPO, you should look at your compensation standards and make sure they are structured and uniform across levels and roles.“ This goes back to the idea of predictability,” said Danielle. “You can start to predict costs for talent, how long it takes to fill vacancies, and standardize your promotion cycle.” When Danielle joined OneStream, managers could promote someone in a one-off capacity. Now, the company has moved to quarterly and bi-annual promotion cycles, and the cadence across all teams helps them predict costs even more. In addition, the company’s finance and human resource business partners meet with leaders  every month, so they could have regular talent partner and cost discussions. “This allows the teams to stay aligned and continually measure the costs against our business plan,” said Danielle. 

Set the equity grades and expectations, too: OneStream worked to establish  equity grades and targets as a private company, so they could drive consistency prior to going public.. This entailed setting two sets of guidelines. The first consisted of setting a company-wide standard for roles and levels across departments. The second focused on accounting for key hires whose comp might fall outside the regular bands. This led to compensation consistency across the company. 

 “It is important to manage the comp bands throughout the entire company because you need to set external stakeholder expectations for how the equity plan is managed,” said Danielle. 

Consider bringing in comp advisors: Setting executive compensation is never easy, which is why so many companies rely on benchmarking it against industry peers. “As we got closer to potentially going public, we began to introduce public company data into our benchmarks,  and we did this in stages,” said Danielle. “We relied on our comp consultants. They didn’t explicitly tell us what to do, but rather provided us with range benchmarks of our peers.”

Don’t forget to make disclosures where applicable: “If you have family members or relatives of executives working at your company, you will have to make disclosures on their comp,” said Danielle. 

Avoid giving employees tax advice: OneStream is in more than 20 countries, with about two-thirds of employees in the U.S. and one-third of them in EMEA with a “sprinkling” in APAC. “One of the biggest lessons we learned was just how high employee expectations would be for us to be their tax advisor,” said Danielle. “We were clear across the people, comp, and executive teams that our company can’t advise on individual tax structures.”

This is a good lesson for any company that goes through an exit – employees have to seek tax information from outside of the company.

Plan for the Big Day and Celebrating Success

Seek readiness support from your stock exchange partner: “NASDAQ provides you with a Monday.com type of tool that your internal teams can use to project manage the path to IPO,” said Danielle. “They also had someone from their team join us on-site to take us through what happens when the company goes public.” 

Recognize the team effort: Companies can only bring 100 people with them to the NASDAQ and that will include any family members of your founders. So you might only be able to bring 70 employees to New York. “We have 1,500 employees, so we were intentional about holding celebrations across our offices around the globe where our team members could be together in person,” said Danielle. “That allowed them to feel the momentum, even if they could not be on the floor with us.”

The Takeaway: 

The IPO readiness phase is a stressful time, and it often means the Chief People Officer has to take on extra responsibilities to co-lead the effort. While Danielle’s own stories are unique to her and OneStream, the lessons are universal and can be applied by Chief People Officers looking to run an IPO readiness process through completion in today’s macroenvironment.

Her lessons include to standardize as many structures as possible so there is a high level of predictability within the company, lean on her team members as her own role shifted during the process, and make sure the entire organization is part of the IPO celebration, even if they can’t be on the stock exchange floor. 

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