I know access to capital is a big factor in this decision, but especially post Sarbanes-Oxley I have the feeling the forces against finding product-market fit are so incredibly high for public companies. Having seen first hand what that really means: The implicit taxes on morale of regulation, compliance, disclosure duties, transparency, auditing, bureaucracy etc. are so gigantic that I have a really hard time imagining the viability of this. I've found it's pretty hard to attract high freedom high responsibility talker-doers to a public company for those reasons.
That's certainly a driving factor behind startups staying private for longer than ever and continuously rising VC round amounts, but I already found it's hard enough for a profitable company with product-market fit to go public and still keep their top talent that I don't want to imagine what that feels like pre-revenue.