When selling a company or taking a company public, the sale price factors in future growth and earnings, so it's not like you're "missing out" on that growth (a

When selling a company or taking a company public, the sale price factors in future growth and earnings, so it's not like you're "missing out" on that growth (assuming you get a fair price). It's easy to conclude that 'All companies should hold out on selling' because if you look at the data for companies that held out, they outperform. However, there's extreme selection bias. When your true value is in the tens of billions (FB/GOOG), you're never going to get acquired for a fair price because no company can afford you, so you are always going to be in the 'held out' cohort. There are plenty of businesses whose true value (future discounted cash flow) is in the hundreds of millions or low single digit billions. At this price, many of these companies could find a suitable buyer at a fair price. Since liquidity is a good thing, there's no reason not to. > If a company blows up, the vast majority of the returns are coming after 4-5 years. I mean, look at GOOG, and only returns since it went public (~6 years after founding) Using GOOG as an example of expected returns is an absurd generalization. By definition, the expected return on a public stock following an IPO roughly aligns with the rest of the public market (4-8%).