Will the biggest value creation stay in private markets rather than public ones?

Harry Stebbings · Jan 10, 2024

The new generation of late-stage private firms that extend the private window are enablers keeping companies from going public, like Twinkies or hitting snooze instead of going to the gym

51:08 20VC: Did Figma Kill M&A Markets in 2024, The Three Biggest Mistakes Made in Growth Investing, The Three Requirements Companies Need to Go Public in 2024 with Ed Sim and Jamin Ball

Zachary Bookman · Dec 6, 2024

Heavily private-funded companies like Stripe and Databricks will ultimately have to go public

They've raised enormous sums and at some point investors and employees need real liquidity; mega private rounds are largely funding secondary for employees and tax issues

Scope: private staying-private dynamic can continue for a while longer

53:17 20VC: From Unsexy Startup to $1.8BN Acquisition | Why VCs and Founders are Fundamentally Misaligned | Why Valuations and Fundraising are BS | Lessons from Josh Kushner and Marc Andreesen | Zac Bookman, OpenGov

Jack Zhang · May 27, 2025 · hedged

An IPO is ultimately unavoidable for a company like Airwallex, though it is not a present focus

Right now the company is head down building

Scope: not a current priority

82:43 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang

David George · Dec 15, 2025

The stay-private trend is overblown — most of these companies will still go public, just later than historically

Some companies have idiosyncratic reasons for staying private, many CEOs he talks to are happy or excited to be public, and no public CEO he has worked with has ever said they regret going public

9:47 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z

Miles Clements · Mar 9, 2026

Everything the public markets used to be needed for — employee liquidity, M&A currency, valuation marks — can now be done privately, but only by roughly the ten best private companies in the world; most companies still need to go public

Secondary and tender infrastructure only exists at scale for the very top private names like Databricks and Stripe

Scope: public companies can also do things private ones cannot

42:45 20VC: Inside Accel's $4BN Growth Investing Machine | Cursor is Dead is Total BS: Here is Why | What Missing Rippling and ElevenLabs Taught Us | Are $2BN-$10BN IPOs Dead | Why Now is a Great Time to be Thoma Bravo with Miles Clements

Harry Stebbings · Jan 20, 2025

The extended window of staying private is real — the largest private companies have no need to go public for the foreseeable future

Private capital demand is enormous, as shown by off-the-charts demand for SpaceX

62:01 20VC: Why Large Seed Rounds Increase the Chances of Success | When to Sell in Venture | Why Multi-Stage Firms Do Not Do The Work | Is Europe Totally F****** and Why AI Means London Can Compete with the US with Hussein Kanji

Tom Hulme · Apr 10, 2025 · hedged

Whether the UK's best companies list publicly may become an irrelevant question, because leading companies increasingly aren't listing at all

We have spent a lot of time assuming listing makes sense, but the trend direction is against it — portfolio companies like Stripe aren't listing anytime soon and are finding other ways to deliver liquidity

Scope: "I wonder whether"

80:31 20VC: How to Fix the UK Tech Ecosystem | Why We Need to Flood the UK with Venture Capital | What the UK Can Learn From Sequoia, Stripe and Norway | Why Now is the Time to be Bullish on China & Lessons from Jensen Huang with Tom Hulme & Stan Boland

Bucky Moore · May 5, 2025 · speculative

If AGI and space assets scale as some expect, those companies may stay private for a very long time because private markets will keep funding them

Private markets are extremely robust right now, so companies reaching multi-trillion scale won't need public markets for demand

Scope: conditional on how megatrends like AGI, robotics and space actually play out; he says the honest answer on how big platforms get is 'I don't know'

15:22 20VC Exclusive: Why Mega Platforms Will Win in VC | Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed | Why Market Sizing is BS | Where Will Foundation Models Build/Buy Apps vs Where Will They Not with Bucky Moore

Lucas Swisher · Feb 23, 2026

The emergence of large private 'platform companies' that stay private is an enduring structural trend, not a temporary one

Roughly 18 of the top 20 private companies would have been public a decade ago; they are at huge scale, growing faster than almost anything accessible in public markets, have multiple products, and have shown they could be great public companies but choose to stay private

Scope: rough justice on the top-20 figure

9:10 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher

David George · Dec 15, 2025

The returns in technology are now generated in the private markets before companies ever reach the public markets, so private tech is no longer a niche asset class but the main event

The number of public companies has halved over the last twenty years and many of the companies that would historically already be public are staying private

13:27 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z

Lucas Swisher · Feb 23, 2026

In the public markets it is hard to own the future, so if you want growth above 30%, durability of that growth, and access to the future, you have to own private companies

Public markets offer liquidity and the ability to trade in and out, but it is hard to own the future there; if you want to be levered long the token factory you need OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX/xAI and the downstream AI application companies, which are all private

Scope: public markets still offer liquidity and tradability

7:45 20VC: Inside Coatue's $70BN Machine: Why Price Matters Least | Why Mega Markets are the Most Important | How to Assess Durability of Revenue and Margins in AI with Lucas Swisher

Mitchell Green · Mar 7, 2026

Great companies choosing to stay private because of meme-ified, volatile public markets is bad for LPs

45:13 20VC: Why the SaaS Apocalypse is BS | Why China Will Win the AI War | Why 50% of VCs Should Not Exist and are Tourists | Why Stock-Based Comp is the Hidden Sin of the Valley with Mitchell Green, Lead Edge Capital

Harry Stebbings · Mar 28, 2025

Within five years, the majority of companies that could go public will choose not to; being public will become an unfortunate consequence of scale

19:49 Majority of ipo eligible companies will choose to stay private within five years

Harry Stebbings · May 19, 2025 · hedged

IPOs are not the mechanism for recycling wealth into ecosystems: consumer-brand companies can stay private and use buybacks and late-stage secondaries, while boring B2B companies have to go public because there's no late-stage private appetite for them.

Late-stage private demand for secondary access exists only where there is a consumer brand people want to own; without it, the public markets are the only route.

70:36 Consumer brands can stay private via buybacks and secondaries but b2b companies must go public

Jason Lemkin · Nov 30, 2022

At the time of investment he expected all of his companies to eventually reach a billion in value, but only after a very long time and via an IPO

It used to be that a company had to IPO to be worth a billion; SaaS has since gotten so big that this changed

54:41 Saas scale growth now enables billion dollar outcomes without an ipo

Jason Wilk · Apr 21, 2025

Direct-to-consumer companies leave value on the table by staying private, because passionate retail investors can push a consumer brand's valuation far beyond any reasonable private multiple

Tesla would not be a trillion-dollar private company; its cult of owners buying the stock pushed it above any reasonable EBITDA multiple it would trade at privately

11:43 Consumer brands capture more value public via retail investor passion

Imran Khan · Aug 26, 2024

Encouraging companies to stay private for very long is bad for investors because the technology landscape shifts roughly every fifteen years and invalidates the original investment thesis

Platform shifts have come every fifteen years — mainframe, microcomputer, internet, mobile, now AI — so a thesis underwriting a private hold can be completely obsolete by exit

9:47 Platform shifts every fifteen years make very long private holds obsolete

Peter Singlehurst · Mar 19, 2025 · speculative

Highly profitable private companies could start paying dividends, becoming a source of liquidity for private investors

If these companies become very profitable and continue to grow, dividends become a plausible payout route while staying private

38:22 Private companies could pay dividends as a liquidity source instead of going public

Chamath Palihapitiya · Jul 13, 2020

Public capital markets are now a more liquid and efficient market for young tech company founders than private markets

From 2000 to 2020 the US investable universe halved from 8,000 to 4,000 companies while the number of hedge funds grew ~100x and capital ~1000x; with interest rates at zero, growth-seeking investors must buy assets that compound for five to ten years, leaving technology companies as the last bastion of investable surface area

23:30 Public markets are now more liquid and efficient than private markets for young tech companies

Andrew Feldman · Mar 24, 2025

Private AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are now receiving valuations that historically were available only in public markets

42:27 Private ai labs command valuations once reserved for public markets