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>> I think the biggest difference between today and 20 years ago when I first go into Silicon Valley is that most founders are generally already planning their exit. There are a lot of startups whose mentality is "get big quick enough so that we can get bought out by Google/Facebook/Amazon/etc".

Exactly the same mentality 20 years ago, except back then it was mostly about the IPO.

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Fair point. IPO was the goal during the dot-com boom/bust (I saw this all first hand as well) but at least the founders weren't looking to ditch the company right after. The VCs were of course, they're always the snakes in the grass no matter what the backstory is.

My experience is that there was a fairly brief window in which founders believed an IPO was a plausible way to flip a company, and that before, during, and after that, the more common objective was to build a company to flip to some other firm that already had done an IPO. When we started our multicast company in early 1999, none of us believed for a second that an IPO was in our future, and our VC pitches (mostly guided by the VCs, some of whom ended up funding us) were almost entirely about who might end up buying us.

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