Private Company Maturity Matters
Hari Raghavan, ex-COO of Forge, on late-stage investing and facilitating secondary sales
The key point is that private status stopped being a useful shorthand once companies began staying private long after the core business was already proven. By the late 2010s, Airbnb looked more like a mature large cap internet company with broad financial visibility, recurring secondary activity, and employee liquidity programs, while Scale AI represented a much earlier company using private capital to fund rapid experimentation and expansion. Lumping both into one private bucket hides very different risk, disclosure, and liquidity needs.
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Airbnb had already crossed roughly $1.7B of revenue in 2016 and was profitable in the second half of that year, then continued scaling toward public markets. That is a very different underwriting problem from backing a fast growing company still searching for its long term shape.
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In private markets, maturity shows up in behavior as much as age. Large companies like Airbnb, Uber, Stripe, and SpaceX were running tenders, extending exercise windows, and sharing enough operating data that secondary buyers could form a directional view. That is closer to a controlled public market workflow than to venture style blind risk taking.
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Scale AI illustrates the other end of the spectrum. It was founded in 2016 and later raised a $1B Series F at nearly $14B valuation, showing how private markets now fund companies deep into the growth curve before public listing. Size of round no longer means company maturity in the old IPO sense.
The market is moving toward a middle zone where very large private companies behave more like lightly disclosed public companies, with regular liquidity and clearer operating signals. As more firms stay private past $1B in revenue, secondary platforms, tender programs, and structured disclosure will become core market infrastructure rather than edge cases.