Sure... If your company is so attractive that the investors will go along with it. IMHO, Facebook's history is an outlier. Most startups aren't positioned with the leverage they had when raising money. I don't know enough about Palantir's history to comment.
This kind of depends on the interest rates and the Nasdaq (50%). The number of VC in the market(30%) and the allocation of LP to VC (10%).
I see the VC asset class as an arbitrage on private company valuation. As the number of VC increase the arbitrage opportunity disappear and switch sides, from the buyer to the seller. I.e. founders are getting to arbitrage the VCs.
Personally I think that there is a market failure here, where the government protect mom and pop investors from making risky bets on early stage startups, and yet allow them to invest on some crypto scams with no questions.
I envision that, like cannabis, this will be solved soon in the form of some sort of public stock exchange for startups.
This is a bit later than the first few years, but all of Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple were very highly profitable (on gaap, not some xxx-adjusted ebidta bullshit) at their IPO, and for a while before, with hockey stick revenue growth. And the IPOs happened much earlier in the company lifecycle back then. Look up old S-1s.
