No. of Recommendations: 2
Without the exit of going public there would be, essentially, no venture capitalists, no firms that specialized in just how you got companies from a market cap of $10,000 up into the millions. If every time you had someone who figured out how to do this, they had to, for obscure moral or aesthetic reasons that are hard to justify with math or physics, hold that investment for the next 20 years to prove their moral worth and depth of character, we would have no steady stream of new start-ups.
I don't disagree with the gist of this. And what I wrote was not a moral judgement of any sort. It was simply a statement of opinion that IPOs today can't possibly be as lucrative as IPOs in the past. That's because all the early rounds of investment have been done privately and those investors will reap the vast majority of the reward. The public part of the investment is now much later and much less return remains to be had.
