Yeah, I don't know how it is for everybody, but I'm reminded of the line, "A good horse runs even at the shadow of the whip." When I've been at places that have taken VC money, there's always a deep, pervasive awareness that the deal is "exit or bust", and that every investor call should include good news in up-and-to-the-right form. At least with us, they didn't have to do much explicit yanking of the chain. Probably for the same reason that Fat Tony doesn't often have to remind people that he expects to be paid on time.
The yanking doesn’t even stop then; it just changes who is pulling. Various institutional investors are all over Google to do better than it is. Google makes billions of dollars a year. More. More. More.
Google has founders shares. Everyone always like to blame Wall Street. Management listens to them not because they have board seats but because they want to keep the equity based comp party going.
Reddit took $1.3 billion in investor money. What makes you say they're not having their chain yanked? Going public solves an investor problem, but I don't see it solving anything for Reddit's community.
Your implication is that if they don't need more money, they can just ignore all those investor-owned shares? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Reddit's an odd duck given their ownership history and their investors. But I don't think they're that odd. Nobody gives you that kind of money without expecting to be well paid and soon.
Twitter's problems started with VC investment where they were always compared against Facebook. I don't think Wall Street is much better, but by the time they went public, valuation and growth trajectories were already established by the VC narrative.
No. It's a term specific for those investors working with: I don't expect you to survive, but if you don't get at least 10000% of return, you could as well be dead.
