About trying to find an answer to: “Does the company's leaders want it to be sold or go public? And [ ..] time horizon” I think it’s impossible to find the right answer. I worked in a startup where every year the founders would tell us that next year we’d go to IPO. Then that year comes, and they wouldn’t: one year it was another company’s big IPO that had sucked the market dry, one year it was that valuations were low, one year it was that the cost of IPO was high, and on and on. I don’t think the founders were intentionally lying, but this question in advance, was not the right question because no one knew the answer. This question basically only begs for an answer to please the audience. So instead I think you have to look into the market and stats of that year as a whole to guesstimate where the company may be headed.