Sam Dickie

Always excited.

Yeah, very unprecedented, unprecedented excitement.

Yeah, kind of everything actually.

So they are large, so $3.5 trillion if they all get away this year trying to squeeze that through a fairly narrow IPO window.

So that's the size of the French GDP in six months.

Wow.

And for context, so SpaceX is raising $75 billion and the other two, if you believe that, the press are raising maybe $100, $125 billion between them.

So that's $200 billion between three companies in the space of six months.

For context, the IPO boom and the dot-com boom was about $200 billion, but that was over 1,000 companies, so very concentrated.

And I think you touched on something really interesting there is the scale of capital that's sloshing around in private markets.

So in the old days, there was only a small amount of private capital that could access private markets.

So typically, you nursed a company from early stage through to still quite early stage with small licks of capital

until it got to IPO and that's when the liquidity window opened and you had access to maximum liquidity and then you built the company from there.

Now, a lot of people have access to private markets, sovereign wealth funds, huge mutual funds,

big pension funds, you've got a lot of capital sloshing around.

So to give you some context, OpenAI a couple of months ago raised a private round over a couple of weeks of $125 billion.

Now for context, the ultra-liquid IPO market, the biggest IPO in history was $30 billion.

There's plenty of capital to keep these companies private forever.

So the cynic would say the reason they hit the IPO market is not to access more capital to build and grow, but to give insiders a big liquidity event.

To be clear, I don't agree with that cynical view, but it's just a different perspective.