The Structural Shift in Tech Investing
Companies that once went public at $200 million in revenue are now staying private well into the billions. The steepest part of the growth curve has moved to the private markets.
For forty years, public investors could buy the best technology companies early in their growth curves. Apple went public at $1.8 billion in today's dollars. Microsoft at $700 million. Salesforce at $1.1 billion. Workday at $4.5 billion. All at roughly $200 million in revenue.
That era is over.
By 2019, companies like Snowflake were going public at $1.2 billion in revenue. Today, Stripe remains private at over $4 billion. SpaceX has never sold a single public share and is valued at $800 billion. The steepest part of the growth curve — and the best risk-adjusted returns — has moved to the private markets.
The numbers tell the story
More than $5 trillion in enterprise value now sits across 2,000-plus private technology companies. There are over 1,600 unicorns globally — up from roughly 500 in 2020 — but only about 30 venture-backed technology companies go public in any given year. At current exit rates, it would take decades to clear the backlog.
The median age of a company at IPO has risen from four years in 1999 to 10.7 years in 2025. Stripe has been private for 16 years. SpaceX for 24 years. Databricks for 13 years. Revolut for 11 years. These companies have billions in revenue — at scales that would have triggered an IPO a decade ago.
The IPO market is not absorbing the supply of companies that need liquidity. But their shareholders do need liquidity. Employees who received equity grants five to ten years ago have significant paper wealth but no cash.
The venture model is under pressure
The venture capital model was built for a world where companies went public in four to six years. Today, the best companies remain private for twelve or more. A venture fund with a ten-year life is no longer well-matched to this reality.
Meanwhile, AI is dramatically reducing the capital required to build and scale companies. If fewer venture dollars are needed to get a company to $100 million in revenue, the venture model — organized around deploying large amounts of capital into staged rounds — faces a structural challenge.
The public markets face their own reckoning
Median forward revenue multiples for public SaaS companies have compressed from approximately 17x at the November 2021 peak to 5–6x today — a 65% decline. The market is repricing software as investors grapple with the implications of foundation models for the traditional SaaS business model.
The deeper issue is generational. Today's public market winners are aging into incumbency just as a new wave of AI-native challengers is building on the foundation model stack to compete on price and functionality. Oracle is 49 years old. SAP is 54. Adobe is 44. Intuit is 43. Salesforce is 27. Workday is nearly 20. These companies have customer, product, and distribution moats that make them highly likely to survive. But they also have technical debt, large employee bases, and customers who will be slow to cut over to a new code base.
Where the opportunity lives
The secondary market allows us to invert the venture model: invest in the best-performing company across the entire landscape — regardless of which firm led the Series A or B — and acquire shares at prices that offer attractive risk-adjusted returns.
The direct secondary market reached approximately $240 billion in total transaction volume in 2025 — nearly ten times its size a decade ago. It is now the primary liquidity mechanism for private company shareholders. An estimated 71% of all VC exit dollars in 2024 came from secondary sales, not IPOs or M&A.
Every share traded on the public markets is itself a secondary share. What distinguishes our target companies is simply that they happen to still be private.