Founders and employees would be totally OK with staying private, if the board would ever permit issuing a dividend. That's the "normal" way to have an "exit" (i.e. return profits to shareholders) without a public offering. The purpose of delaying issuing a dividend is to reinvest profits / additional fundraising for growth, but that growth should still result in a dividend in the future, just a larger one if the investment in growth succeeds.
Instead, founders and employees are encouraged to look forward to an IPO precisely because somehow we've come to believe that it's sinful for a company to issue a dividend, as if doing so means giving up on the idea that further growth is possible, when really it's only an acknowledgement of the fact that (a) there's a healthy rate of growth, (b) that healthy rate of growth costs $X, (c) if the company has $Y cash >> $X growth cost, then the healthy thing to do is to issue a dividend (so that shareholders can invest the excess into companies that are currently better recipients), rather than attempting to force growth faster than the company can support.