IPOs used to be necessary for growth but that hasn't been the case for many years. Private markets are now so large that the only purpose of an IPO is exit liquidity for employees and early investors. This change has been a major driver of inequality in the states and there are a number of proposals to make it easier for the public to participate.
It's pretty sad that Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Sequoia etc. are the ones who capture all of this growth and not the public, as would have been the case in the previous generation.
It does seem as if this IPO is the "reward for effort of the last few years" as opposed to "building the runway for the next few years of growth". The latter I can understand as a high risk, high reward investment, whilst the former feels as if it should be a blue-chip sort of investment, but there are too many unanswered questions, or at least too many unique arrangements in the structure for it to be any kind of slow-but-trusted-into-the-future stock purchase.
> It's pretty sad that Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Sequoia etc. are the ones who capture all of this growth and not the public
the public could buy google, m$, nvidia and so on and benefit from that growth, no?
Anthropic would not have scaled this quickly if it was publicly held. Perhaps, that would've been a good thing.
> It's pretty sad that Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Sequoia etc.....
Three of those four are public companies, so the public can absolutely participate.
One might ask why the public markets would even offer this liquidity. One important answer is that they are forced to via index inclusion.
So if you know an index buyer who takes satisfaction in staying above fooled-by-randomness active traders, remind them that that they are now the designated unload zone for shares the privates don't want anymore.