Are there any examples where the capitalism bottom line is ignored and a company keeps growing with extremely premium generous acquisition offers on the table? I can't think of any, but there could be a few. However, I expect it's pretty rare.
For companies with such tremendous growth, the venture capitalist firms are primarily looking to make their <big-multiplier> return and push priorities accordingly (understandably).
Market forces in capitalism are highly potent.
I’m curious why you think it isn’t? On a long enough timescale all good things seem to be acquired by large megacorps for a fuckton of money.
Slack, Linode, Minecraft, the list goes on. Eventually they all make the thing less than it was before under the founders’ vision. At least from my perspective.
It won’t stop me from cheering them on, but I’m still very skeptical of them not being bought out in 10 years.
What you want to know is the probability of a small, independent, high quality provider remaining independent, high quality and not bankrupt.
It does seem to be rare in the tech space, especially in the US. Becoming one of the largest public corporations on earth is one way to do it, as you suggested, but the odds of that happening are miniscule.
Except Valve I guess, but that was never a public company that could be acquired to satisfy investors in the first place.
I'm very explicit both internally and externally that an acquisition is a failure mode for Render. We're building this for the very long term and plan to keep it that way.