[aanm1988]

> Yeah weird how people hold up IPO as a holy grail

Because employees actually gain out of it. That's also a benefit as it gives more people financial freedom and they can go off and do their own companies. Instead these people get locked in to AirBnB for years.

[elastic_church]

Companies always have the option of giving dividends to common stock shareholders, buying out shareholders, simply giving bonuses or any number of things if they didn't continue to reinvest all capital and pursue losses.

Private companies even issue bonds on public bond markets, these can be as large or larger than equivalent equity offerings on the stock markets.

Don't let the mechanisms pursued by a handful of VC firms in Silicon Valley distort your understanding of capital formation.

[hkmurakami]

Prime example is Cargill. $100B in revenues, privately held.

https://www.cargill.com/about/financial/credit-rating-inform...

[elastic_church]

If any of these tech companies decided to just go with 6 months of positive revenues, they could issue bonds in Europe representing waaay cheaper capital than VCs and not have to worry about it for the next two decades.