Important for HNers who don&#x27;t understand this already to internalize this: &quot;VCs will try to get their money back&quot; by <i>selling the company</i>, <i>not</i> by taking money out of the company.  Once you&#x27;re talking about these sums of money, the odds-on form the sale needs to take is an IPO.<p>Assuming a company continues to grow quickly and looks like it has a good shot of IPOing in the forseeable future, there is <i>no sum imaginable</i> of money which cannot be found for it.  (That is a risk factor for every startup on the IPO path, because nobody grows forever and each additional financing round dilutes you more, but $100 million is not, in the grand scheme of things, an impossibly huge amount of money to use to build a software business.)