It used to be that you could find an IPO underwriter after 100M in revenue and growing YoY above others in the competitive basket.
I’m not sure that’s true anymore, I think you still need the revenue, but just need attention. everything else is just whatever because you can’t predict 10 year outcomes for any business at this point with any level of confidence, and there’s nothing to compare it to other than extremely different businesses.
Ultimately it’s more of the same goal with differing levers:
Offload a massive illiquid investment onto the public so that investors make their fund
Make sure it can tread water long enough for people to forget about it so it can go through the long and slow enshittification period
After all the prime investors have liquidated and some cooling period, risk of lawsuits from activist investors drops significantly, they can ratchet up the margins, do a few years of layoffs to pump the price.
Then everyone involved is back to where they started, only the top 100 richest people put even more distance between themselves and everyone else so they can now invest in radical life extension or whatever