Bill Gurley

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.

And if you step in and delay that and get decent ownership, you wouldn't get otherwise.

Maybe those firms are better off than they would have been participating in those companies while they were public.

Here's a super important piece that goes on top of that.

They then turn around to go to the LP community and say, companies are no longer going public when they used to.

If you want exposure to that growth in these important high-tech companies, you have to invest in me.

And that resonates.

I agree with you on the wish.