It's not about going public, it's about raising VC. So don't raise VC. But then the question is: how will you fund product development before you become profitable? If that's not a problem for you, you're in the minority.
You can raise VC without giving up majority control.
In two ways.
First, don't allow dilution to push you + any co-founders below majority. If you focus on building a profitable business, and you're not trying to be the next Uber, this is extremely doable. Ellison at Oracle, Gates + Allen at Microsoft, and Omidyar + Skoll at eBay were able to basically do this; Bezos & Family were also roughly able to accomplish this leading up to Amazon going public (his family still owns nearly 20%).
Second, use the Page-Brin voting shares control approach. Most investors will not like this, don't take their money. Find investors that sync with your vision for the company.
I took on a well known investor, and gave up a modest corner of my business. I retain majority, and will continue to indefinitely. The key is to be able to grow your business into the second or third inning with that first investment, then strictly control dilution thereafter. For example I could do two rounds of 15% dilution from here, and the investors would still not have majority control.
If your business needs to bleed large amounts of red ink, then you're going to put yourself into a corner accordingly. There probably is no good outcome unless you happen to be among the tiny number of companies that make it out of that start alive. For everyone else, you always have a choice.
I've always thought the VC model for software is fundamentally flawed.
Software is so easy to get started that if it can't bootstrap from a bare minimum product, maybe the idea isn't that great as a business.
On top of that, I think there's a bit of circular logic and wishful thinking involved in getting VC money. It encourages companies to spend more money than they need to on things like scaling and fancy design and excessive marketing, because they need to scale to meet VC expectations.
The VC model was essential for the hardware oriented companies that pioneered it because they needed a lot of equipment and capital to build chips and computers. There's so little capital cost with software nowadays, I don't know why VC still persists.
That is definitely not true of all software. Consumer and SMB Web applications, maybe, but domain-specific business software can be a rather nontrivial and capital-intensive undertaking. Those are the quiet companies engaged in the "boring" business of making money that you don't hear about.
That said, a lot of the money goes to marketing. Google AdAwords and low-touch web-based marketing doesn't work for all kinds of products; in an esoteric business market niche, the cost of customer acquisition is rather high, as trade shows, conferences and personal connections matter a lot more.
