Oswald Oschin

I found it really fascinating.

I mean, this kind of venture capital machinations are super opaque and not comprehensible to normal people, in my opinion.

And yet there's this huge race behind the scenes to just get in any way you can before the IPOs, you know, theoretically inevitably collapse.

uh boom more who are the people buying the secondaries are they being marketed like by shady middlemen or like are there people who want to just drink from the fire hose and are hunting down the secondaries wherever they can like what's the how does this market work yeah it feels like the wild west or like you're out on safari looking for open ai equity um so as as i talk to vcs there's a range of sketchiness

Basically, like, you know, there's the pretty legit deals where a VC firm already has, you know, hook up for $100 million of anthropic equity or something.

And they'll go to their, you know, investors or their partners and say, hey, do you want to put $5 million into our purchase of this product?

uh, anthropic equity.

Sure.

That makes sense.

But then if that person who put in the $5 million check then breaks up their $5 million into little packages of, you know, a hundred K or something, and then shops that to more people down the chain, I think as the numbers get smaller,

and the audience gets wider, the whole thing gets sketchier.

This happened with Facebook, where too many people own secondary shares, and it actually forced them to go public because of SEC rules.

So the SEC changed the law so that more people can own secondaries, and that helped create this huge secondary share market in the first place.

Taylor, from a kind of culture point of view, when was the last time you saw IPOs become the talk of the town and everybody on the internet buzzing about corporate fundraising?

It's been a very, very long time.

I mean, I think...

Maybe the dot-com boom.

I wasn't really around for that as a coherent person.

I was a kid, but from what I understand, it was pretty frothy.

I don't think we saw this sort of similar fervor around social media because I think it was just still so new and it was still so much smaller and there wasn't a clear upside.