For SurveyMonkey and other Internet companies of a certain age, an initial public offering can be a hard thing to resist.

The Palo Alto-based web survey company was founded in 1999, and by 2012 had revenues of $113 million and 2 million active users. Naturally, such stats landed it near the top of the most highly anticipated initial public offerings to come out of the Valley—but the company wasn’t interested.