Dead capital. There's no need for public funding until they are reasy to cash out at the top, if ever.

How do investors cash out? Do they sell to new round investors?

Going off the other reply, I wonder if a highly-active secondary market means that companies can raise series [A-Z]+ rounds effectively forever, where each "round" just refers to a giant purchase of shares under strict company supervision. Is this the new game for startups?

If investor pool becomes too loose the company becomes de facto public, subject to all SEC-enforced regulations.

The judgment is subjective though, so pushing the boundaries could be a calculated risk.

Correct. There is also a secondary market.

> There's no need for public funding

You're assuming private liquidity to be infinite and private credit (that fuels VCs) to always have favorable rates.

When you have companies like SpaceX and Anthropic raising billions, it is hard to believe that private credit isn't virtually infinite.

so how do stripe employees get liquidity? can anyone sell their secondary shares?

I can't speak for the specific case of Stripe, but it's fairly common for private companies to have a "tender offer" in which employees have the opportunity to sell some portion of their equity. This is often done in conjunction with a new investment round.

Outside of big tech, it's also fairly common for private companies to simply not offer equity to employees.

Tender offers.

https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-ba...

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/tender_offer

https://carta.com/learn/equity/liquidity-events/tender-offer...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

(secondary markets are sometimes an option, depending on stock transfer restrictions)

Bankruptcy court?

FTX bought 8% of Anthropic for $500m in 2021.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/josipamajic/2026/03/18/ftx-owne...

Company I worked for had a deal where I could sell back to the company at any time.

The price was determined by a formula based on revenue and such, so I always knew what they were worth.

I was not allowed to sell to anyone else though.

There's a newish term for this: RLO, Recurring Liquidity Opportunity. These are tender offers at some recurring interval. Even some companies that have a shorter lifespan (say 7 years) offer this.

Stripe might buy back the shares at a good price. They might be able to sell on secondary markets.

Private/secondary markets.

regular tender offers