Bill Gurley

And some of the LPs that I talked to, this is fairly unusual, they've traded in and out of Stripe.

And the company's somewhat comfortable with it.

And that's very new and unique in our world.

Correct.

More like the old pink sheet trade by appointment thing.

We're about to dive into all that.

I want to mention one thing that I think is fairly interesting and intuitive once you hear it.

But those investors that are encouraging that behavior, I think there's another element that's going on here.

If you think about a traditional IPO, the thing I hate maybe more than anything, as you already know.

The bank's going to be very deliberate on their allocations.

So if a company were going public, a, let's just say, large public investor and private investor, firm X, puts in for an allocation, what do they tip?

They oversubscribe by 100X, and they may get 1% or 2% of the offering.

They're not going to get 30%.

And when these firms go to a company like Databricks or Stripe or whoever and encourage this round, they can get 30%.

So they can get a bigger ownership percentage than they would get through a traditional IPO process.

And in fact, they share a lot of these deals.

So kind of an oligopic opportunity there.

to hoard the public IPO growth years and take it away from the public markets.

So we all know Amazon went public less than a billion dollars and then traded over a trillion.

And the public market had access to all those great years of compounding.