I’ve been seeing more IPO announcements recently. I had a gut feeling that IPO activity has increased materially, but I hadn’t looked at the data to confirm. In fact, I haven’t looked at the data since my last update in March 2025 (see here), so today I did. Here are the updated IPO stats through July 2, 2025:

• 2025: 175

Here’s the 2025 breakdown by month:

• January: 28
• February: 28
• March: 19
• April: 32
• May: 34
• June: 25
• July: 9 (so far)

For comparison, here are previous years’ IPO stats:

• 2024: 225
• 2023: 154
• 2022: 181
• 2021: 1,035
• 2020: 480
• 2019: 232

IPO activity picked up after March. At this rate, we’ll exceed 2019, which was pre-COVID and pre-ZIRP. We’re on track to have the most IPOs since interest rates rose rapidly in 2022.

We still have six months left in the year, and anything can happen. If the Q2 taught me anything, it’s that curveballs can come at any time (e.g., April tariffs). But I suspect lots of technology CEOs and their VC investors are watching the IPO stats and strongly considering going public while the window is open and public market investors are receptive to buying shares in technology companies.

If you want to see the IPO stats—recent or historical—try here (where I get my IPO data).

A few days ago, I posted about the Los Angeles Lakers being sold for $10 billion (see here). The team was bought in 1965 for $5.175 million by Jack Kent Cooke (see here). What a crazy increase in value: $5.175 million to $10 billion over 60 years. Looking at the average rate of growth in team value per year, or compound annual growth rate (CAGR), it’s roughly 13.5%—over 60 years.

I wanted to see how this compares to the returns of great investors. The easiest comparative is Warren Buffett, since he began investing professionally in the 1950s and just retired. According to CNBC, Buffett took over Berkshire in 1965, and from then through the end of 2024, Berkshire shares rose 5,502,284%. CNBC says that equates that to a CAGR of 19.9%. See the details here.

So, owning the Lakers turned $5.175 million into $10 billion, and that was amazing, but investing with Buffett in Berkshire would have far outpaced that, assuming you invested $5.175 million and held the entire time.

Using a reverse CAGR calculator (see here), if you invested $5.175 million in 1965 and got Buffett’s 19.9% CAGR, you’d have $277.3 billion by the end of 2024.

Ten billion dollars and $277.3 billion. That’s the difference between compounding at 13.5% and compounding at 19.9% over 60 years. That 6.4 percentage-point difference is a $267.3 billion difference!

This week, it was announced that the Buss family is selling a majority ownership in the Los Angeles Lakers at a $10 billion valuation. That’s a huge sum for a sports franchise and reportedly the richest deal for a sports team in history (see here).

When I read the headline, I immediately thought about Jack Kent Cooke and Adrian Havill’s biography of him, The Last Mogul. Cooke built a fortune in newspapers and radio in Canada working alongside Roy Thomson (think Thomson Reuters), whose family is now the wealthiest family in Canada. Cooke then moved to L.A. and purchased the Lakers in 1965. He paid what was then a record price of $5.17 million. In 1966, he spent $17 million building the famous Forum in L.A. so the Lakers and the Kings, the NHL hockey team he also owned, could play in the same arena.

Jack signed Wilt Chamberlain to the Lakers. He traded for Kareem Abdul Jabbar. And he drafted Earvin “Magic” Johnson in 1979. The Lakers won a championship under Jack and were on their way to dominating the 1980s.

But Jack ended up getting divorced and, as a result, selling the Forum, the Kings, the Lakers, and his ranch to Jerry Buss in June 1979 for $67 million. Forty-six years later, the Buss family is selling the Lakers for $10 billion.

It’s wild to think about how the valuation of the Lakers has skyrocketed. In 60 years, the team has gone from being worth a little over $5 million to being worth $10 billion. That’s a roughly 13.5% compound annual growth rate—a striking example of the power of compounding (another example here).

If you’re interested in reading more about Jack, Havill’s biography is great. I also posted a series of posts about what I learned from the book. The Lakers deals are specifically covered here and here.

I enjoy learning about venture capital firms, and First Round Capital is one I kept tabs on. Its investments in Roblox and Uber were what originally sparked my interest in the firm a few years ago (see here and here). Josh Kopelman, founding partner, gave an interview recently in which he shared facts I didn’t know about First Round and explained some important concepts in VC.

Here are a few of my key takeaways from the interview:

• VC firms have grown from fewer than roughly 850 employing 1k–2k investors writing checks in 2004 to, today, over 10k funds employing over 20k investors writing checks.
• Venture firms, to attract larger pools of money into the VC asset class, are beginning to adopt the Blackstone asset management firm model. Blackstone is playing a scale game that focuses on cash-on-cash returns. Traditional venture capital has focused on alpha, which provides a superior internal rate of return (IRR, a measurement of compounding rate of return). Blackstone’s model is to provide higher cash dollar returns, as its dollars under management are massive, but lower-percentage returns that are steadier.
• The Venture Arrogance Score is a calculation Josh runs that looks at two things: how big the fund is and what percentage of a company the fund owns when the company exits. He said a hypothetical $7 billion venture fund that aims to own 10% of a company when it exits would need to capture roughly 50% of the dollars that venture capital realizes at exit during the three-year period when the fund is making investments. No firm has ever captured more than 10% of the total venture capital dollars realized from companies exiting.  He details the math in this section of the interview. He doesn’t say this, but assuming that a single firm can get 50% of the total exit value created by all founders in the U.S. when history says the very best get less than 10% is arrogant. The math doesn’t math on generating superior returns for massive venture funds.
• First Round aims to make 70 to 80 investments from each fund and own 12%–15% of a company initially. It targets 8%–9% ownership after dilution when a company exits. The firm takes Series A pro rata.
• First Round has been in business 20 years and made 90% of its profits in a 36-month period. VC makes its money by holding investments until the market is at the irrational disequilibrium or “extreme f*ing greed” part of the cycle. Bill Gurley agrees with this view (see here).
• A VC investor who started in 1980 and retired in 2000 made 17% of his profits in the first 17 years (1% per year). He made 83% of his profits in the last, 1997–2000 period.
• Multiple expansion in irrational disequilibrium and “extreme f*ing greed” is how VC returns are maximized.
• First Round is run like a company, not an investment firm. The firm has a CEO-type partner who doesn’t invest. He focuses on strategic planning, running experiments, iterating and learning, and offering products and services that add value to founders.
• First Round’s partners make their money from carry (profit sharing), not management fees.
• For the first seven years, First Round spent more on staff and products and services for founders than it took in from management fees. It invested ahead of planned growth. The partners had to contribute almost $8 million from their own pockets to fund the management company during this period.
• First Round still spends most of its management fees and has a staff of approximately 50 people.
• Value in venture capital firms is created by how they make decisions. Yet, many firms don’t capture their decision-making process so decisions can be analyzed and learned from later.
• Many venture capital firms are run poorly because founding investors don’t think of the firms as companies creating products or offering services to customers.
• First Round created a 36-question rubric that each investor answers before the partners discuss a potential investment. They want to capture each partner’s independent thinking before groupthink has a chance to creep in. This creates the fabric for debates about investments and game tapes to be reviewed later. Their goal is to capture the root of their investment decisions.

Those are my big takeaways from Josh’s interview, but he discusses a lot more. If you’re interested, check out the entire interview here.

One of my friends told me today about an interesting start-up. It’s called Reducto, and it’s a service that turns “unstructured documents into useful insights.” The team just raised $24 million from several venture capital firms to fund its growth.

During my testing for my book project, I learned that it’s hard to feed large amounts of unstructured text to large language models, and finding insights was challenging. The responses were inconsistent or useless.

I’m curious to play with Reducto’s free playground to see how its platform addresses this problem.

This week there was lots of discussion in financial media around the CoreWeave IPO. CoreWeave provides cloud-based GPUs to AI developers. The IPO was completed today after the number of shares being sold in the IPO was reduced from 49 million to 37.5 million and the share price was lowered to $40 from the planned $47 to $55. (see here)I haven’t kept close tabs on the IPO market since my last update in October 2024 (see here), so I took a look today. Here are the updated IPO stats through March 28, 2025:

• 2025: 73

For comparison, here are prior years’ IPO stats:

• 2024: 225
• 2023: 154
• 2022: 181
• 2021: 1,035
• 2020: 480
• 2019: 232

IPO activity picked up in 2024. We were pretty much back to the 2019 level. COVID and ZIRP contributed to the 2021 IPO explosion (see here). When interest rates began rising sharply in 2022, we saw an implosion of IPO activity in 2022 and 2023.

Time will tell how receptive the market is to CoreWeave. It took almost a year before public-market investors were interested in buying technology companies that IPOed in 2023 and 2024, such as Reddit, Instacart, and Klaviyo.

CoreWeave has seen explosive growth in the last year or so because of soaring AI demand (OpenAI is one of its biggest customers). I’m sure venture capitalists and technology entrepreneurs are watching to see how receptive public-market investors are to buying the company’s shares.

I’m curious to see how CoreWeave performs and whether we’ll see more technology companies going public via IPOs in 2025.

If you want to see the latest or historical IPO stats, try here (where I get my IPO data).

Yesterday, I shared what I learned about how much of the company each Netflix cofounder owned (see here). I also learned from reading Netflix’s S-1 document that VC firm Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) owned roughly 43% before the IPO and roughly 34% after it. I learned that TCV partner and cofounder Jay C. Hoag has been a Netflix board member since 1999 (see here). Jay and TCV invested before the IPO, so they’ve seen the company go from a promising start-up worth tens of millions to a global, publicly traded company worth over $400 billion.

I view investors who found investment firms as entrepreneurs, so I was curious to learn more about Jay and TCV. I’m early in my research, but I found Jay’s interview (listen here) from 2021 on the Invest Like the Best podcast. A few things I found interesting:

• Netflix stock traded down 15–20% after the 2002 IPO and stayed down for about six months.
• TCV was founded as a private and public (i.e., “crossover”) investor. This means that it invests in private technology companies (i.e., start-ups) and technology companies traded publicly on the stock exchanges.
• In 2011, TCV made a PIPE investment in Netflix after the stock had declined 70%. The stock traded down further after the PIPE investment, which was for $400 million, with T. Rowe Price participating, too. More details are here and here.  
• “By being a private investor, it made us better public market investors” and “By being a public market investor, it made us better private investors.”
• “The capital allocation exercise is to look across the technology landscape, take advantage of all the research and knowledge that we have, and look for the best investment . . . and not be bucketed by either private or public.”

Jay and TCV also invested in Zillow, Peloton, Facebook, Airbnb, Tripadvisor, Spotify, and many more wildly successful technology companies. I’m excited to learn more about Hoad and what led to his outsize success.

On January 7, a friend told me about a way to host an AI model on my local computer. He said it could be a cheaper alternative to running in the cloud with Google, AWS, or Azure for my software project. I told him the MVP wouldn’t be used by many people, so for now we’d host in the cloud to move faster. The company he suggested was DeepSeek, and I looked into it a bit that day. It was promising, but I decided to investigate more after my MVP is ready.

Well, on January 20, DeepSeek released a new open-source model that caused a storm in the tech community. It allegedly beats OpenAI in reasoning. This new model was reportedly created with only $6 million and significantly fewer chips for training. Other models are rumored to cost over $100 million to build and require tons of chips.

This chatter picked up significantly this weekend and caught my attention. Then, the DeepSeek app became the most downloaded app on the Apple app store this weekend. This morning the stock market took notice and sold off sharply. Bloomberg says that today, $1 trillion in value was erased for public tech companies and wealthy individuals lost over $108 billion (see here and here). NVDA alone lost roughly 17% in market value today, which means it lost over $500 billion in value in a single day (see here). That’s a record stock market drop in value of a single stock in a single day.

I haven’t played with DeepSeek yet and don’t fully understand all the implications of this open-source model performing better than OpenAI, but I’ll do some digging and have some conversations this week to learn more.

A few weeks ago, I read The Money Masters: Nine Great Investors: Their Winning Strategies and How You Can Apply Them by John Train. The book introduced me to T. Rowe Price, and I read his biography, too (more here). I really enjoyed learning a little about several people from a single book. I decided to make biographical anthologies a bigger part of my reading and discovery strategy (more here).

This week, I’m reading another book by John Train, Money Masters of Our Time, and I’ve been reintroduced to another investor I want to learn more about. Julian Robertson founded Tiger Management. I learned about him two years ago while exploring an idea for a studio for venture capital managers. During my research, I was lucky enough to get connected to someone who worked in Robertson’s back office during his heyday who explained to me how the operation ran with the Tiger Cubs.

Robertson was a successful hedge fund investor, and he also seeded and incubated tons of investors who wanted to start their own investing firms. These budding investor entrepreneurs worked out of his office and were known as the “Tiger Cubs.” The list of people Robertson helped in this way is impressive; it includes well-known investors such as Chase Coleman of Tiger Global and Philippe Laffont of Coatue Management.

I think Robertson pioneered a model of seeding and incubating budding investors that’s needed today. The model is clearly lucrative, as Robertson’s economics in the firms of some of his successful Tiger Cubs made him another fortune.

I want to learn more about Robertson, so I’m going to see if I can find a biography of him.

Over the past two years, I’ve studied countless investors who’ve had outsize success. One firm I studied was Altos Ventures. It popped up on my radar when I read the S-1 for Roblox and learned the firm had an almost 25% ownership stake when the company IPOed at a $35.5 billion valuation (see my post here). Altos’s stake was worth over $8 billion at IPO, an enormous haul for a single firm. (The Altos ownership stake can be seen on page 172 of the S-1, here. The ownership is under the name of Altos partner Anthony P. Lee, who serves on the Roblox board.)

Today, an interview of Ho Nam, an Altos founding partner, was published. I’ve watched several Ho interviews; this one was deeply personal and highlighted his struggles while building Altos. Ho described how Altos struggled for over fifteen years. The firm raised four funds and hadn’t generated meaningful returns. The partners hadn’t made any money and weren’t seeing eye to eye.

Their struggles led Altos’s three partners to change their strategy. They originally played what Ho calls the VC lotto game. They’d find promising companies early and focus on preparing them to raise the next funding round from a brand-name VC firm at a higher valuation. That strategy imploded when the dot.com bubble burst. The Altos partners realized they were playing a game they weren’t suited to win. They changed their strategy to focus on helping founders build enduring cash flow–positive businesses that didn’t require excessive venture capital funding. They focused on helping the founders create value for customers in a capital-efficient manner, not on hyping them up to later-stage VC firms.

This strategy change worked in a major way for Ho and Altos. The firm has since had several early-stage companies that each has gone on to be worth over $1 billion; a few, over $10 billion. The firm still owns a stake in Roblox, although it’s been distributing shares to LPs since the IPO, likely for liquidity reasons. As of this writing, Roblox has a market cap (valuation) of almost $42 billion. Coupang is another company Altos invested in early, and that company is publicly traded with a market cap of over $40 billion as of this writing.

Here are a few of my takeaways from Ho’s interview:

• Everyone can’t play every game. Figure out what game you can play and win. Play that game, even if it’s not popular at the time. Winning fixes everything, and you’ll look like a genius in the end.
• Struggle is often a prerequisite to outsize success. The painful times force you to evaluate why things aren’t working, hopefully leading to changed behavior. The wisdom gained during struggle leads to better decision-making, which is required for outsize success.
• Companies exist to add value to customers. You add value to customers by solving their problems. Focus on solving the customer’s problem and capital to grow your company is less likely to be an issue.
• The best founders are capital efficient. Constraints force creativity, which leads to better solutions for customers. Raising too much money leads to loose spending, which leads to founders focusing on raising capital from investors, not solving their customers’ problems.
• Control matters a lot for founders. If you’re constantly raising rounds of capital, you're losing control, and your board could fire you.

I enjoyed this interview, which contains nuggets of wisdom for founders and investors to learn from. If you want to watch this section of the interview, you can find it here. You can watch the entire interview here.

Note: Roblox is probably one of Altos’s most capital-efficient portfolio companies. Ho shared on X (formerly Twitter) that Roblox raised only roughly $10 million in funding to get to cash flow positive. All other capital raised was for secondaries (to buy shares from other investors) or to put on the company’s balance sheet.