[tptacek]

My experience is that there was a fairly brief window in which founders believed an IPO was a plausible way to flip a company, and that before, during, and after that, the more common objective was to build a company to flip to some other firm that already had done an IPO. When we started our multicast company in early 1999, none of us believed for a second that an IPO was in our future, and our VC pitches (mostly guided by the VCs, some of whom ended up funding us) were almost entirely about who might end up buying us.