If you don’t go public with your company, some other company will go public, and buy your company or your customers from under you with the money they got from Wall Street. There are some companies that can try and resist, but the field tilts against them.
When you own something and someone comes to offer you money to buy it, you have this thing called “No” you can say, and then they don’t buy it. It’s a pretty neat hack. I learned it from Gaben.
Epic is trying to IPO and has all kinds of investors. It tried to undermine Valve by buying out its partners by just spraying money at them for exclusives - you know, “disrupt” the industry. Steam prevails because they are real good at what they do, and they had a head start, but it takes a Gaben to not sell out, a good team and a lot of luck to manage that. Steam is playing against a tilted field is what I’m saying, and is one of the few players who successfully are managing it. They are the exception.
Yes, notice how the person who owns the thing gets to decide to sell or not to sell it. Wild concept, I know.
