Why do investors want to delay an IPO?
Suster points out that the longer the company stays private, the more valuable it becomes. And if during this time VC’s can hold onto their pro-rata (fancy word for what percentage of the startup they own), they can make a ton more money.
The premise of Growth capital is that if that by staying private longer, all the growth upside that went to the public markets (Wall Street) could instead be made by the private investors (the VC’s and Growth Investors.)
Further down, continuing the Sister quote:
three examples Suster uses – Salesforce, Google and Amazon – show how much more valuable the companies were after their IPOs. Before these three went public, they weren’t unicorns – that is their market cap was less than a billion dollars. Twelve years later, Salesforce’s market cap was $18 billion, Google’s was $162 billion, and Amazon’s was $17 billion.