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The exit allows you to eventually start a new startup and go through it all again, an IPO/ continuing private business means that your doing the same thing for a long time and may eventually become big company you were trying to escape from initially.

I guess that would be an interesting question to pose, if your startup continued to grow would you wlecome the challenge of expanding it to more of a big company or would you prefer to jump off and do something small again?

Tony Wright is a good example, leaving rescuetime to jump back into something new now that rescuetime has become a more stable, growing company.

I guess they call it bitter sweet =). Of the respondents there were only a few that had been through an acquisition; had there been more we'd have been able to draw more conclusions. From a personal point of view (heysan (YC) acquired in '09) - you're 100% right, we got our exit at the expense of some of our humanity.

True, but the idea is also that they make the founders very, rich.