It’s impossible to know for sure but if they’d stayed private I think they’d be more not less successful, just because startups can move more nimbly. Although we’d need to define success, we’d be here forever…

It wouldn't have. They had over a billion in debt, which Google casually fixed. Google then very conveniently supplied them with GCP server power. And remember all of this was in like 2014, way before the AI hype. They wouldn't have had access to capital to survive long enough to make it to today.