Bill Gurley

And that's just a very different reality from when I started.

And today, you'll read about a $300 million Series B. The numbers were very small back in those days.

I mean, these companies were going public.

With $1 or $2 million a quarter in revenue and not having raised that much money, like $20 million or something, today every company that is being identified as a winner is ingesting $400 or $500 million minimum before they even think about it.

going public if they're ever going to think about that.

So it's institutionalized in a way, somewhat similar to what happened to the P industry, you know, private equity industry 10 or 15 years ago.

There are cycles of mania.

And obviously that timeframe you were talking about was a peak cycle in that way.

And certainly one could argue things are manic today for a lot of different reasons.

I do.

I worry about it quite a bit.

And there's a number of, I mean, data points.

So the number of public companies in the U.S.

is less than half of peak.

And so we've really had a fall off in the number of companies that are actually public.

Partially, you could blame that on just a bureaucratic creep, and I would say kind of a legal creep, right?

The number of weird derivative lawsuits that are allowed are part of what causes it to be expensive to be public.

There was another thing that happened.

There used to be a shareholder threshold that would force you to go public, and there were a number of companies that

that literally had to file as a result of that mechanism.