All good points. Those are justifications for VC's existence as a financial instrument. But that's orthogonal to whether retail should buy into IPOs. Elsewhere

All good points. Those are justifications for VC's existence as a financial instrument. But that's orthogonal to whether retail should buy into IPOs. Elsewhere in this thread there's discussion of VC concern regarding downstream investment/valuations, reluctance to have down rounds, etc. Clearly VCs can and will delay rounds unless they can earn a premium. It's self evident that this extends to IPOs, the last "downstream investor". Due to self selection, these IPOs will be biased toward times when the VCs judge that hype/expectations are high enough to unload at a premium. Part of their job is ensuring such conditions exist at exit, via marketing, etc. Apparently the evidence bears this out -- the first two years after IPO, companies tend to underperform after adjusting for equity risk factors: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2929733 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2929733