a large population of top financial advisors to support these employees on their financial journey .”
SAM ADAMS
TITLE : EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR , PRIVATE TO PUBLIC STRATEGY
Managing the public versus private pathway Sam Adams is the Executive Director of Private to Public Strategy for Morgan Stanley at Work . A veteran of the ‘ route to IPO ’ journey prior to joining Morgan Stanley , she managed a number of prominent IPO projects , which helped her to decide that managing share plan administration programmes and supporting companies through the process was the perfect use of her acquired skills .
“ We have several private clients who have no intentions of ever going public and we ' re starting to see a larger trend in new clients who want to establish stock plans with regular liquidity activity already preprogrammed in ,” explains Adams .
“ This is because it gives them the flexibility to allow people to take some of the value that they ' ve helped create in the company off the table through the shares they ' ve earned as an employee , while not putting so much pressure on the overall company to have to make a decision of whether or not to go public within a certain time period .”
As someone who has witnessed firsthand the complicated process of the path to IPO , Adams is passionate about her role and says companies that manage their equity programmes well not only benefit themselves but in turn , also change the lives of their loyal employees .
“ One of my personal missions in life is to make sure that capturing that opportunity doesn ' t get lost on other people . It really can be a life-changing thing , and Morgan Stanley at Work can not only help the company have the underlying infrastructure to make those
EXECUTIVE BIO
INDUSTRY : FINANCIAL SERVICES LOCATION : CALIFORNIA , US
Sam Adams is currently an
Executive Director at Morgan Stanley at Work leading a specialized team focused on helping private companies transition their stock plans into the public market .
Prior to this role Sam lead the global equity team at DoorDash through building a best-in-class equity infrastructure to operate as a growing public company and a tremendously successful IPO in 2020 . She also led MuleSoft ’ s global equity team through an IPO in 2017 and subsequent acquisition by Salesforce in 2018 .
Additionally , she designed MuleSoft ’ s Total Rewards and Mobility practices , including global compensation programs , ESPP , and employee benefit packages . Sam was also a key member on the Trulia legal team managing all things stock and corporate compliance through their IPO in 2012 and subsequent acquisition by Zillow in 2015 . Sam received a BA in Sociology from UCLA in 2004 and the CEP designation in 2015 .