"The founder is the asset class... The IPO is another financing event." a16z's David George and Santiago Rodriguez on why the biggest companies are staying private: Santiago: "If you look at the top six companies today, Anthropic, OpenAI, Databricks, Stripe, Waymo, and Revolut, by last round valuation, they add up to about $2.4 trillion." "This is more than the combined market cap of IPOs we've seen in the last 10 years, excluding SpaceX, which adds up to $1.7 trillion." David: "Especially for founder-led companies, one of the things that we've talked about and that I've written about is that the founder is the asset class at this point." "The bet that we make, and part of the reason that it's been a benefit for some of these companies to remain private, is they can many times take bigger swings in the private markets that have longer duration paybacks." "Zuck and Elon are kind of obvious exceptions to the rule in the public markets." "You see it manifest in the numbers in companies like Databricks or Stripe: massive, massive new bets in new product areas, and you can see revenue acceleration that happens as a result." "You can do that in the public markets, but it's gonna catch greater scrutiny. Meta's stock price at the nadir got below 100 bucks a share when people were very, very skeptical about their investments in AR/VR." @DavidGeorge83 @santiago__rdz