Public Markets

“Often the markets will punish you dramatically if you do that, because when they see that the number of subscribers has gone down, even if revenue has gone up, they will not like it.”

“Our data shows one percentage of growth in the public markets is equivalent to three percentages of EBITDA.”

“The two leading companies in the space are private, and their various numbers leak out from time to time, but you definitely don't get a complete picture, and it's very unusual to have the two companies driving the public markets are actually private.”

“I am, ah, I'm hopeful, excited to see the big labs go public in the next 12 months. I think that will be, I think that'll be, I think it'll be interesting. It'll be exciting. And I think there is huge market appetite for it.”

“You pair that with a public market that's vastly outperformed, the broad private market measured on, say, a Cambridge index level, and it's causing most people I know to have very difficult conversations around what is the future path of private allocation in …”

“We do discuss and say that privates are not essential. Meaning we should choose to have them because of the return we believe they will deliver over time. And that return needs to be in excess of what's offered in public markets.”

“I think public markets are Substantially more difficult to hold than private markets.”

“I do think the public market has a much greater tolerance for investment and a much longer time horizon than a lot of people in the venture ecosystem. Give it credit for it.”

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

“Confidential filings don't fully obscure investor protections because all the traditional data needs to be released before any money changes hands, but it speeds up the time to market and increases coordination between private companies and their future shareh…”

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

“Given the predominance of indexing in public markets and that talent vacuum into another space, there might be a lot more alpha in public markets.”

“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 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…”

“And I think if any of the AI companies have been public, they would have been getting decimated.”

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

“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.”

“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 …”

“Will these companies be less valuable 10 years from now than now? I think the answer is probably yes. Will that be true for every individual company? I don't think that's true.”

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

“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.”

“AI native SaaS is getting funded at an insane rate while you have these massive sell-offs in the public market.”

“So there's fewer people competing, but they're all doing the same thing. Whereas the public market, there's tons of people competing, but they're all playing a different sport.”

“But in 20, 27, I can't see the checks of these sizes being written again, unless you go to the public markets and you start giving retail Share your retail shareholders and big institutional pension funds, things like that access to try and finance their colos…”

“The thing that most startup founders, in my opinion miss when they think about fundraising and private companies is that at the end of the day, everything converters to public markets.”

“From a math standpoint, if you look back over any 10 year rolling period, Privates have performed publics by 580 basis points. Over three-year rolling periods, 500 basis points. This last three years is one of the rare three-year cycles that hasn't.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The biggest impact of that over the next couple of years is that when private markets unlock for liquidity, the first wave of that money from the institutional market is going to go back to the public markets. It's not going to get recycled in the private mark…”

“I think people will be talking about public markets and the potential for outperformance from active managers because you're teed up pretty well to have a good period of time for active managers.”

“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.”

“First of all, public markets have shrunk by half in the last 20 years.”

“90% of real estate in this country is owned outside of the public market. So you've got 10% of the market that trades publicly.”

“As time went on, as we saw through the 2000, the passive indexation and ETFs and the capital markets changes in the public market rendered some of those advantages obsolete.”

“We're having to get to the memo stage, and usually we start buying it before, because in the public markets, you know, if you have a good idea, you could take a month and a half to, like, write a memo, but by that time, the price may have moved. So usually we …”

“I mean, if I ran a private company like Stripe, I wouldn't go public.”

“It should be correctly priced because everyone has access to the same information. It's actually gotten less efficient over time, for sure.”

“Quarterly reporting, especially in the public markets, is a net negative for companies, for investors. I think it's intended to provide transparency, but it ends up doing short-term thinking.”

“On the investing side, we obviously have exposure in the portfolio. We have invested in a lot of the big AI companies and we have exposure to them. Net though, we don't have as much AI exposure as the broader public markets. And that's a challenge from a relat…”

“There is very little money in DC today that's in alternatives or private markets. Small amounts, very bespoke plans, but virtually all of the allocations today are sitting in public markets.”

“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?”

“We realized that you cannot be a specialist in both public and private markets at the same time. You need to start with your beachhead.”

“There is more persistence in private equity than in the public markets.”

“It's not clear that you can get the globally diversified portfolio of assets just in the public markets the way you definitely could 25 years ago.”

“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…”

“If you're in a large public company like I was, you realize that the public markets really care about predictability over innovation for sure. I mean, and so innovation is stifled so much. And in fact, it kind of causes large companies to protect themselves th…”

“When I, before going to the road shows, when I talked to my counterparts who would raise money in the private market, the conversations are a lot different, a lot about time, a lot about good potential un sort of undiscovered time, et cetera. Here it's a lot a…”

“The public markets value them on their fee stream much more than on their investment returns.”

“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…”

“Today, trillions of dollars in capital are moving from one place to another, in most cases in one direction, from public markets to private markets, which really causes a lot of liquidity management challenges for the various allocators.”

“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.”

“So if the public market, on average, has a mid-teen starting EBITDA margin, In the middle market, we're talking about mid-single digits, so there's just less room for maneuvering, less room for error.”

“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…”

“So I think the biggest trend is the merger or the blend of Private markets and public markets coming together in one place in one orchestrated system, which is what we're aspiring to build. We call it the total portfolio solution.”