With the amount of capital available, no question that many companies that would have IPO'd years ago are electing to stay private (hello, Stripe!).
The cynic in me says: this is great marketing, because the best Sequoia fund is the early stage fund (always oversubscribed) and now as an LP you can't invest in just the early stage fund. (But the reality is I bet they forced early stage fund LPs to invest in their growth vehicles anyway, so there is no material change other than marketing. Which is very good.)
The opposite is also true, many startups have come out of the woodworks during the COVID market craze to go public because the money is there (SPACs are the extreme example).
I think the political writing on the wall is that the legal barriers are going to be lowered for entering the public market. So Sequoia and others are going to need to market themselves to founders as an alternative to going public.
An SPAC is nothing but a fraud vehicle. Look at the new SPAC driving the new Trump "social network". They didn't have to do any work. No due diligence, no financial disclosures, no business plan, no numbers - nothing.
After a few iterations of this and billions sucked up by these conmen, the government will have to step in and clamp down, while the conmen (and probably HN) bleat about "big government", "regulations", and "socialism".
The cynic in me says: this is great marketing, because the best Sequoia fund is the early stage fund (always oversubscribed) and now as an LP you can't invest in just the early stage fund. (But the reality is I bet they forced early stage fund LPs to invest in their growth vehicles anyway, so there is no material change other than marketing. Which is very good.)