History repeats! 20 years ago, some business exit plans basically boiled down to "...and then we'll get bought by Microsoft!" Not too bad, at least for the founders.

Especially if your goal is to land a nice FAANG job anyway. It's gotten to the point where interviewing is so competitive, exhausting, opaque, and ultimately random, that it might actually be easier to do a bootstrapped start-up for a year and get bought by Facebook than it is to grind leetcode and interview-prep for a year and roll the dice on the interview circuit. I wish I were joking.

EDIT: Wow, no disrespect to founders, I did not intend to trivialize the work you do. Instead of "easier" I should have said something like "more controllable" or "less random".