O'Driscoll: A delayed Google IPO would have set a $140B exit benchmark
Rory O'Driscoll · Rippling vs. Deel Lawsuit: WTF Happens Now? The Future of the Late Stage Private Market · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · May 22, 2025 · at 32:42
Rory O'Driscoll, General Partner at Scale Venture Partners, uses Google's 2004 IPO to illustrate how single outlier companies staying private longer distort broader venture capital exit datasets.
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“If Google had stayed private one year longer, Google's market cap in the end of oh five, it was about a hundred and forty billion dollars. If they just stayed private another year, The entire data would be swamped by the fact that, oh my God, the biggest venture exit ever was a hundred and forty billion in oh five. Simply because if the Google CFO had had a heart attack in 2004 and they postponed their IPO for a year and a half, then the largest exit would have been in oh four and it would have been Google.”
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