public markets

“Lots of times you'll hear institutional investors saying that they want at least 300 to 500 basis points better than what they think they can do in the public market.”

“I'd argue it's probably not that healthy, and that you're actually seeing some very weird dislocations when, you know, the scarcity of equity in the private capital markets for the real dominant market players, you know, you end up bidding up the, in the price…”

“I think when we look 20 years ahead our vision for the world is that the great enduring companies will actually be privately held and they will find liquidity in private markets rather than public markets.”

“I think one of the big problems structurally in the capital markets world today is we have an environment of hyper liquidity in the public universe, and then zero liquidity in the private. And there's literally nothing in between right now.”

“Well, certainly the multiples paid in the private markets at one point in time were exceeded that in the public markets, and that was cause for a lot of concern in the late 15 into 16, and you saw the crossover investors pulling back because of that, and you a…”

“And so from the company's perspective, this is a much easier and straightforward way to get to the public markets.”

“People are very impacted by short-term gyrations in the public markets. So we have kind of frothy public markets or fully valued public markets right now, and that affects B rounds, C rounds. Kind of makes no sense.”

“In the venture space, when people think of investing, they generally think about, you know, a primary investing round where you're investing in the company, and yet they seem to forget that in the public markets, 99.99% of shares traded are all secondary trans…”

“Yet today there are a handful, not a lot, but a handful of companies that enter into a liquid public market At above a hundred billion dollars. That's not a private market overhyped valuation. That's now a public market with liquidity that you can actually tra…”

“If a thousand billion dollar plus valuation companies were created in the last two years, what we all know to be true is that in two to five years, like the public markets will not be able to ingest a thousand, maybe 2000 of these businesses far from it. And m…”

“The public markets to me are completely disconnected from reality, good and bad.”

“They basically get a window into the future. They get to see the businesses that will be in the public markets over the next five or 10 years and just get insight and understanding and relationships with those companies that you could never get if you weren't …”

“We were this summer seeing businesses get done at 200 times, 300 times ARR. When the public markets were saying like at best you could trade at, I don't know, 20 times forward revenue or something.”

“Whether you like it or not, you can delay it, but over time, great, great, great companies are built in the public markets.”

“Our strategy has always been to distribute shares slash capital right when we can in companies simply because we don't think we know the public markets better than anybody else.”

“There's such a huge price mismatch between, let's say a company's last round of financing and what the macro Is that it's really difficult to invest right now simply because private companies lag public markets in terms of pricing by quite a bit.”

“Work by Hank Bessenbinder demonstrates that in public markets over long periods of time, most companies, public markets earn Returns less than the treasury bill rates. And it's like a handful, less than five percent of companies basically drive all the value f…”

“That persistence used to have to happen in buyouts. But that effect is mostly melted away in the last 20 years, and it's very difficult to find persistence in public markets at all.”

“The private markets have innovation more right in terms of valuation than the public markets do.”

“So, you know, in the public markets, software companies, multiples there have corrected to what we saw in 2016, 1718 to normal multiples.”

“I deployed all my cash at the beginning of the year. Like I feel smart in the public markets. If I deployed it all at the peak, I would feel dumb, but I happen to have a lot of cash at the beginning of the year. I put it all in”

“Two years ago, if you had talked to the public market... It used to be 60 to 70% growth with the -20 to -30% EBITDA. Today, depending on who you talk to, it's like 30 and 10, 20 and 20. Like they want to see both.”

“Businesses don't happen on quarterly cycles, but financial reporting and public markets do.”

“If along that journey the public markets don't see the value that we're creating, and there's a big gap between the value that we are creating and what the enterprise value is of the company, then I think it's prudent to consider all options. And we have a boa…”

“Like that will force companies to get fit. That will force companies to talk about their path to profitability. It will force companies to think about why are we an enduring business over the next 10 years? And while it may seem scary, it's actually like a goo…”

“I just find it much easier for me and my personality to I think generate alpha on the private side. I mean, the public side is always becoming more competitive. You think, if you think venture is competitive, try making alpha versus you know, the NASDAQ, right…”

“I think obviously the public market should have responded differently because I think he is a great, you know, kind of metastrategist, and his, you know, kind of turn into AI who's going to matter fundamentally here is a hundred percent correct.”

“Companies get premium multiples when it's the only way to play a future trend in the public markets.”

“The fact that you've known how the company operates in the private sector does not mean that you know how the company trades in a public market, where it's at the whims of trading machines, of hedge funds of other people that can manipulate the stock price and…”

“There's a lot of private state private early stage investors that don't understand a lot of the dynamics of public markets and valuations and pricing and how and portfolio management at that scale.”

“I think there's a bit of a myth that once you go public, you can't make the investments that you want. I don't believe that's true. I think you can make the investments you want, but you are accountable to delivering those results.”

“In the private market, that valuation didn't really correct, and so they want to go up public at a valuation that just doesn't make sense in a public market, right?”

“You could take leverage, but then you're taking more volatility and I just don't think in technology where you already have a lot of beta, you already have a lot of volatility. You don't need to take a lot of you don't need to take a lot of leverage, especiall…”

“The, you know, the days of rule 40, you're going out at 60 -20, those are gone. You have to be a 30 and 10, 40 and zero kind of growing into a nice profitability curve in order to get public.”

“I think it's important to be early, but if I think about the public markets, we're talking about not years, but months, right? If you are, because the public markets price something so quickly, if you figure it out last year, that hyperscaler CapEx was going t…”

“I think it's better to plan and execute a growth of 30% year over year rather than 80, 60, 3020, 10, you know, because in a way doing such a huge aggressive growth makes you maybe sometimes steal from the future. Not knowingly, but you discover in time. I thin…”

“If you look at the public markets today, and you go look at all the SaaS companies, between the first decile all the way up to the 10th decile, if you break it up, everything other than the first decile is both growing and profitable.”

“The core analytical questions I think are pretty similar. You have different sources of information, whether you're doing public or private, but like you're still looking for the same characteristics, right? Like if you make it very simple, you're still lookin…”

“And I think the market in my opinion is constantly kind of panicking about everything. It's constantly like over-evaluating all these kinds of micro data points.”

“You don't want to be a reaction to other people's reduced view of what you are when you're public. It's just cold. It's ruthless. It's a, it's just results. No, one's ever going to clap for you.”

“You build a portfolio of companies whose strategy says not that they can replicate the best number, but that they can comfortably outperform the public markets with a strategy that's repeatable and differentiable.”

“And there's no doubt that bizarrely enough, The cost of capital in the private markets remains cheaper than the public markets.”

“The public markets are now pricing risk very differently than they have over the three, the last three years. You look at circle, you look at, you know, Nebius, you look at core weave, you look at Palantir, you look at cloud flare. Like these are all businesse…”

“At a highest level, the cheap money is now in the public markets, and Brian's right, you'd be an idiot not to go for it.”

“There's very few high growth companies in the public markets because all that growth has been annexed by the private markets as a bizarre outcome of, you know, ill-informed regulation.”

“The interesting comment is in the public markets, when things start going south, because there's liquidity, everybody can have a stop loss of 10% and get out, and then someone else can come in and think it's going to turn, and you know, yeah, yeah, you can hol…”

“The public markets now are giving me cheaper capital than the private markets, because if you're, if all the numbers are as reported, you're getting roughly 10 X revenues, and the fine folks at Figma are getting between 17 and 30, depending on how available yo…”

“When you're up enough personally, it makes sense to hold your, all your winners in the public markets for taxes and other reasons. There's just no reason if you're personally up enough to sell any winner, right?”

“I can say in our portfolio, the companies that we have invested in over the last year or so, I'm pretty confident that if they were in the public markets, they'd probably have access to capital at a cheaper cost.”

“In the public markets today, you are guilty until proven innocent. It's the full flip side of our criminal justice system where you are assumed that you are doomed by AI unless proven otherwise.”

“I also don't think that every great high growth company will end up trading for six times in the public markets. There are some that are going to trade higher based on very high growth rates or high cashflow.”

“And if the answer keeps coming back, being private is the best way to achieve your dreams. The public markets have a problem and they need to figure it out.”

“I would say that's something I didn't agree with 10 years ago and I've changed my mind totally. I think it's good in the public markets that founders have voting control.”

“The public markets ceded another three to five years of growth to the private markets, which meant market expansion for venture, And market contraction for small cap publics.”

“In the short term over, kind of, Six months to, in a public market, six months to 18 months, momentum plays work, value plays don't, and over a five year period, value plays work, and momentum plays advantage goes away.”

“I mean, it's kind of silly. It's like, do these private market investors look at the public markets?”

“What they've done is they've said for three years, I thought it was temporary, and now I recognize it's permanent, and now I'm going to value based on this growth rate, take a hit off you for technical obsolescence and the terminal value, take another hit off …”

“The markets have been brutal this year, and I think it's not that you're wrong analytically or empirically, but the markets have given up on folks not accelerating. They've just entirely abandoned it.”

“I think this is 100% overreaction because not all software companies are created equal, and we can talk about what the differences are.”

“I think if your business is ready from an from a predictability standpoint, and you had a long-term orientation, then I would encourage you to go public. I think those two things have to be true. I think you have to actually be able to predict your business wi…”

“I might be the only person that believes this, but I think running the company in the public markets is more fun than being private.”

“I think Jake and I are very interested in the public markets.”

“If we were a public company, we'd probably be worth less because the public markets don't know how to evaluate high growth or potential.”

“Look at the financial services company on the, companies on the public markets. They're all terrible. They all don't grow”

“I'm not even convinced the markets care as much as we think, whether it's organic or inorganic.”