[will_brown]

>The public markets are generally very unforgiving. This is why so many tech companies are choosing to stay private longer.

Can you even explain what that means?

In my estimation the companies are staying private longer so the VCs can blow up the valuations pre IPO higher than anytime in history, whereas, if the startup IPO’d from the start there is no way to continue the growth while sustaining the loss (in the real world business have to make a profit to continue) and VCs couldn’t make the same profit they do now, but in all other respects the risk would be the same.

Anyway it wouldn’t be to hard to look at the IPO of VC backed tech startups and determine what % had profits vs operating losses (obviously my guess is the majority are IPOing at losses). Then, a further analysis could be done to see if the average startup company valuations/market caps declined post IPO and how much pre IPO investors/shareholders took off the table.

Edit: looks like since 2010 there have been 100+ tech unicorns ($1B+ valuation) and ~2/3 didn’t make profit. Wish I could readily calculate how much VCs made taking those companies public, maybe someone can link an article/data.