Bill Gurley

I believe a part of it I've been very passionate about is the IPO discount that the banks force upon the market, especially the well-known high branded ones.

But other people point to the cost of going public too high.

Other people cost of it.

Going to the cost of being public too high.

And then, of course, we know money's everywhere.

So we'll come back to this in the second part.

But people don't have to go public, or at least the very successful companies don't have to go public.

M&A is a bit harder to unpack.

Everyone blamed it on Lena Kahn, but she's gone.

And we didn't have record M&A in the first five months of the year.

It's likely MAG7 related.

Those seven companies are sitting on an ungodly amount of cash.

And in any natural universe, that would lead to massive M&A.

And I'm sure they would love to use it for that.

I think they'd buy back stock for it because they can't.

But Washington's not excited about it.

The EU is really not excited about them being active.

And it's a stuck situation.

People don't want to enter into an M&A agreement with a low certainty of close.

And even the WIS deal, which is the big outlier this year, the minute they announced it, they said it would take over a year to close.