It more and more feels like going public is the big mistake in a lot of tech companies, because everything gets real squirrely after that for customers and employees.
Any more, whenever a company I use goes public or is acquired, I start looking for the egress. I'm happy that the founders of whatever it is got a nice payday, but I don't expect their creation to continue being worth using after that.
the thing is once you start private and giving options as comp, your only option is to go public eventually, or screw everyone that's every gotten options.
Profitable private companies that never want to go public can solve this by doing profit sharing with employees, but in tech there's often no profits for a very long time.