The time from founding to IPO is a stat that is widely misrepresented by well-educated people who may not have had the time to check the numbers.
See for instance the graph Company Age (Years) shared by Meritech. There are 8 companies in the cohort that are 20+ years, only 1 (Salesforce) that IPOed with less than 10 years. In fact, from the entire comps (20+ public SaaS), only Salesforce IPOed at year 5.
This looks like it's a very narrow set of companies. We should be looking back farther, and wider. Recall that, for example, Netscape IPO'ed after 18 months and Amazon IPO'ed after 3 years. For better or for worse, 90's companies generally IPO'ed much quicker than the SaaS cohorts mentioned in the data you linked to. Back then, 10+ year timespans until IPO were rare.
The graph shows 50 companies (they don't do a good job at scaling the site, but the data is there).
Netscale and Amazon are only anecdotes and pure exceptions of the dot.com era. The set of companies that went burst during this period because of bad management is composed of at least 15 publicly traded companies. If your compensation included shares of any of these quick IPOs (AOL, Yahoo, pets.com, Global Crossing, etc.) your shares would have ultimately be zero as well (compounding interest is what makes you wealthy with these long-term horizon packages and you wouldn't have sold all your shares at ipo).
Yes those 50 companies are very recent in SV history. Hence we need to look back farther to see the change, because our standards were set many decades ago.
And whether a company goes bust post IPO isn't really the issue here since liquidity is what we're discussing.
See for instance the graph Company Age (Years) shared by Meritech. There are 8 companies in the cohort that are 20+ years, only 1 (Salesforce) that IPOed with less than 10 years. In fact, from the entire comps (20+ public SaaS), only Salesforce IPOed at year 5.
https://www.meritechcapital.com/public-comparables/enterpris...