Maybe we should examine as an industry why so many mediocre men get elevated to positions of incredible power and run great businesses into the ground.
Luck (primarily) and connections. We feel psychologically safe believing there is some determinism _in the world_. But there's none. Studies show that you can have 140 IQ and still end up homeless if circumstances are poor.
This is an extraordinary claim. What is your extraordinary evidence?
Why didn’t it rain today? Good luck! Why was Michael Jordan so skillful at basketball? Just good luck. Why is Linux better than Windows? Good luck! Why did VMS fall off? Bad luck. Why does 2 + 2 = 4? I guess just good luck.
These are all laughably incurious, superstitious answers. Other factors must be at play. Yes, identifying them may require hard thinking and concentration.
Otherwise, what is democracy other than selecting the luckiest? We already had strange women lying in ponds distributing swords for that — and much cheaper and quicker to boot.
> Studies show that you can have 140 IQ and still end up homeless if circumstances are poor.
We’ve likely all known people who were book smart but didn’t have good walking-around sense. Everyone knows others who make poor or destructive choices. The interpersonal skills, soft skills, and emotional intelligence being dismissed in this thread as mere “luck and connections” may be severely lacking. The person may have poor mental health or addiction.
Are you using determinism in the automata theory sense or some other?
Luck here isn't referring to some invisible dice roll whose randomness can not be explained or is just a correlation (like no rain on your wedding day would be), it's refers to variables that the person can not influence. Being born into a rich family is lucky for that baby, and the baby can't have done anything about it.
Competition is for losers, is a way to say to go and compete in a super crowded market where it is impossible to differentiate yourself is not going to make you a winner.
But usually people are called idiots because they don’t swallow the progressive propaganda wholesale.
Google is a public company so in some way they have gone public.
I wish people would remember the stock markets were invented for companies to raise funds, not for the private investors to cash out. The public should be allowed to invest in new companies, not just the rich.
> The public should be allowed to invest in new companies, not just the rich.
Most funds lose money on early stage investing.
Allowing non-accredited investors to enter the privete capital is great for experienced investors like me because we can offload assets to less discerning and less experienced casual investors, but this is truly risky for the vast majority of individuals.
Hell, even in my own personal portfolio I stick with ETFs and call it a day because returns are good enough without active risk management.
> so in some way they have gone public
M&A is not an IPO. By that standard any acquisition by Crowdstrike or PANW is an "IPO".
The lack of competition is at this point choice American politicians and the voters. They should be breaking up mega corporations or at least taxing them at really high rates.
Instead, it looks like all the existing incumbents will just continue to rule over society. They have capital, monopolies, and the moats of distribution channels and contracts with their current customers. There is no fair competition - they’ll just replicate your clever product easily.
> It's a pity going public isn't worth it anymore.
Israeli VCs tend to be uninterested in IPOs in general - too much of an operational headache and it's difficult to exit a position quickly.
In most cases an IPO isn't worth it for founders because an IPO means you lose operational control. It's basically the "Rich versus Kings" dichotomy [0].
Edit: can't reply
> you can control the share allocations going into an IPO to give you solid voting power
Investors do not like that - they want some degree of operational control in order to right the ship if needed.
In the early 2010s, IPOs like Tesla and Facebook were on terms that gave outside investors little control on operations and that's why Musk and even Zuckerberg to a certain extent can choose to reorient to a new boondoggle with little-to-no investor pushback.
In 2026 if you want to IPO, it will be on the terms of JPMC, GS, etc who are underwriting the IPO.
In a private company, it's easier for an investor to offload or get bought out of their position if the founder wants to maintain operational control.
> While you’re accountable to a board of directors and theoretically accountable to stockholders, in reality management often runs the show
In publicly listed companies, it is magnitudes more difficult to build a board that is aligned with you at a personal level versus in a private company because both the board and strategic shareholders will act as checks against you.
> If you’re acquired, you’re giving up ownership and you tend to lose operational control unless you have agreements in place that say otherwise
An acquisition happens when both the founders and investors want to exit, and has less operational overhead and due dilligence versus going thru the process of an IPO in the US.
> This is counterintuitive to me
Well, that's the reality. This is why Stripe, Databricks, and others have remained private for so long despite having hit IPO-level metrics years ago. If you're already generating high 9 to low 10 figures a year in revenue, you can remain private indefinetly and as a founder you would be able to give yourself a compensation package comparable to a public company, but with much less oversight and stress.
> Interesting, why is this more true of Israeli VC's as opposed to VC's in other markets
Significantly less capital.
"Big" funds like YL Ventures, Cyberstarts, and JVP only have an AUM of $800M, $1.4B, and $1.9B respectively.
And if you were going to IPO in the US anyhow, why would you even invest in an Israeli fund, which wouldn't have enough people with experience for an IPO.
And the handful of Israeli IPOs that happened like SentinelOne or CyberArk weren't that successful.
> In most cases an IPO isn't worth it for founders because an IPO means you lose operational control.
This is counterintuitive to me.
If you’re acquired, you’re giving up ownership and you tend to lose operational control unless you have agreements in place that say otherwise.
With an IPO it seems like you have a better chance to retain control: you can control the share allocations going into an IPO to give you solid voting power. While you’re accountable to a board of directors and theoretically accountable to stockholders, in reality management often runs the show, at least until the board runs out of patience with bad earnings.
The problem is if you go public as a small company, it can be hard to survive. You need to meet expectations every time you do an earnings call or watch your stock get crushed, and it’ll never be given another chance. The burdens are also a lot higher in terms of the cost.
You don’t really see companies under $10 billion going public anymore. That may continue to be the case, but it’s terrible for entrepreneurs.
Yes, but a founder deciding to be acquired means they wish to stop having operational control and intend to cash out and exit.
An IPO isn't an easy exit strategy - it takes years to become S1 ready and it takes years to sell off your equity stake if you were using an IPO only to exit.
That's why if you want operational control you fight hard to remain private as long as possible, and if you want to exit you M&A yourself. This makes IPOs only useful if you need to raise more capital than is available in the private market.
Partially. The issue is capital - even Wiz largely raised thanks to Sequoia, Insight Partners, and Index Ventures. American funds are much larger and are able to finance later stage rounds. Most Israeli VC funds end up financing earlier rounds and can't neccesarily participate in later rounds and thus have an incentive to exit earlier.
The system working as intended.
“Competition is for losers” - Peter Thiel