Private Markets

Why "Public" and "Private" Are the Wrong Categories for Thinking About Access to Cash Bending Spoons went public on Nasdaq on July 1, and the market did not wait around to make up its mind. Shares priced at $29, opened strong, and closed the first day up nearly 40%, valuing the Milan-based acquirer of AOL, Vimeo, Eventbrite, and a dozen other formerly-left-for-dead internet brands at roughly $25 billion.

This year, the bell finally rang for SpaceX. Its listing became one of the largest public debuts on record, and Anthropic and OpenAI are now taking their own steps toward the public markets. Taken together, these companies could introduce more than $3 trillion of new market value to public investors in a matter of months, representing a concentration of value entering the public markets in a single window that has few precedents.

Two pieces of news this week that, taken together, say something bigger about where private markets are heading.

Value creation is staying private. Liquidity is learning to follow it as venture secondaries become a crucial on-ramp. For most of modern venture history, the script was straightforward: invest early, support the company, and wait for an IPO or acquisition to unlock returns. That script is now being rewritten as two powerful signals are converging.

Access Is Expanding — and That Raises the Bar for Discipline There’s a quiet but important signal coming out of Washington. The U.S. House has passed the INVEST Act of 2025 — a broad capital-formation package aimed at modernizing how capital flows into growing companies. It’s not law yet. The Senate still needs to act. But the direction of travel is clear: policymakers recognize that more value creation is happening in private markets — and they’re exploring ways to exp

After two years of a constrained exit environment, private-market liquidity is increasingly being delivered through secondaries and structured transactions, not traditional IPOs.

This research report explains how a structural shift in public markets has changed where small-cap growth occurs. Over the past 25 years, companies have stayed private far longer—moving from an average IPO age of roughly 4 years in 1999 to approximately 14 years today—which has diverted many high-quality growth companies away from the Russell 2000 and directly into large-cap indices or kept them private entirely. As a result, the Russell 2000 now contains a materially higher