Another part of VC economics to understand is to look at Uber. Total disaster, right? Softbank and retail investors got totally screwed by the IPO due to questionable economic assertions made by Uber. But the angel and early series investors, circa 2011? Still made out like bandits. An IPO price of $72, when you paid pennies per share, times several hundred thousand shares equals a cool $10mm, easy. Perhaps not as much as they would have liked, but that's still a pretty good payday considering later investors lost money.

WeWork entirely failed to IPO, so early investors not named Adam Neumann got screwed. Thus, on the spectrum of gregarious companies, with WeWork and one end and Uber at the other end, a company just needs to be on the Uber level of gregarious.