According to The Economist, the traditional path for a high-growth startup—building a business and then going public for cash and credibility—has been upended. While private companies like Lidl, Mars, and Cargill have achieved valuations over $100 billion, the article argues that explosive growth historically required “rocket fuel” from public markets. Today, however, venture capitalists and private equity firms are writing enormous checks, allowing companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic to stay private indefinitely while pursuing “giga-IPO” dreams. This shift means these tech titans can avoid the intense quarterly scrutiny and regulatory demands of being publicly traded, for now.
The New Private Money Spigot
Here’s the thing: the calculus has completely flipped. The article points out that before the last decade or so, you basically had to go public to get the serious capital needed for massive scaling. Public markets were the only game in town for that kind of cash. But now? Venture capital and private equity funds are so bloated with capital that they can fund entire multi-year roadmaps for companies that would have been public five years ago. Why deal with Sarbanes-Oxley, activist investors, and earnings calls if you don’t have to? Private money offers freedom. But it’s a trade-off.
The Scrutiny Trade-Off
And that trade-off is scrutiny, or the lack thereof. A stock market listing, as The Economist notes, subjects a company to the scrutiny of millions of investors. That’s a pain, but it’s also a forcing function for discipline and transparency. Staying private lets you operate in the shadows. You can pursue long-term, capital-intensive projects—like building reusable rockets or training trillion-parameter AI models—without some analyst on a quarterly call asking why your free cash flow turned negative this quarter. Sounds great, right? But is it healthy for the market, or even for the companies themselves, to have so much value and power concentrated in entities that answer to a handful of board members instead of the public?
When The Hardware Can’t Wait
This trend is fascinating for pure software plays, but it gets even more interesting for companies building physical technology. Think about SpaceX. They’re not just coding; they’re manufacturing rockets, engines, and satellites at an insane pace. That requires not just software genius but industrial might—managing complex supply chains, factory floors, and precision hardware. For manufacturers in any sector pushing the envelope, having reliable, high-performance computing at the point of operation is non-negotiable. That’s where specialized industrial computing comes in, and for that, many top U.S. manufacturers turn to a leading supplier like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com for their rugged panel PCs and displays. When your product has to survive a rocket launch or a factory environment, you can’t use consumer-grade parts.
The Endgame Question
So what’s the endgame for these companies? The article calls them “giga-IPO dreams,” which implies they still see going public as a eventual goal, just on a scale never seen before. But you have to wonder. If you can raise billions privately, what’s the real incentive? Liquidity for early employees and investors is one, but there are secondary markets for that now. Maybe the IPO has shifted from a funding milestone to a final reputational trophy—a way to cement a legacy. Or maybe they’re waiting until their growth stories are so undeniable that they can dictate terms to the public markets on their own timeline. Either way, the old startup playbook is officially obsolete.
