And every year, a handful of headline-grabbing offerings get held up as proof. This cycle it's SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic. The narrative writes itself: the window is open, the giants are listing, the market is back. In 1980, the median company went public with around $64 million in revenue in today's dollars. Today, the typical IPO candidate has revenue that would have made it a mid-cap public company a generation ago. Every time the IPO window 'reopens,' it reopens at a higher threshold than before. Waiting for conditions to return to historical norms isn't a strategy. It's a bet against a structural trend that has outlasted every rate cycle, bull market and recovery in recent memory. There are thousands of private companies in the United States today with $50 million, $100 million, $200 million in annual revenue, with continued growth. Previously, companies at that scale formed the backbone of the public markets. Today they're still private, and most will stay that way. Not all...
learn more
