I'm curious what you think VCs, etc. who are investing in all these private companies want to do?

The only difference with public companies is we actually have data about their finances.

The private companies are doing it all under wraps.

Don’t conflate two different investment models.

1. Investors who want to invest in companies with a growth story and want the company to grow bigger and be “successful” enough to exit either via an acquisition or the public market. But often times these days, just to pawn off to the greater fool.

https://medium.com/@Arakunrin/the-post-ipo-performance-of-y-...

2. Investors who want to go in and make the company worse and do enough value extraction for short term gains. The canonical case is when a restaurant chain owns its own real estate. They split off the restaurant from the underlying real estate and make the restaurant pay rent that goes up. The restaurant flounders and the real estate holdings increase in value.

And another strategy is to acquire companies in your vertical, roll them all up, fire redundant staff and integrate systems and then exit. Of course you enshitify the smaller once independent mom and pop systems in the process.