30th November 2022.

OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public. Within five days it had a million users. Within two months it had a hundred million. 

It became the fastest growing consumer application in history. 

Everyone was talking about it. Your colleagues were using it at work. 

And sitting somewhere in the back of your mind was a thought that probably crossed every investor’s mind at that moment.

I wish I could invest in this company.

But you could not. OpenAI was private. It did not trade on any exchange. 

There was no stock ticker you could look up. No buy button on any app. The only people who had been able to invest in OpenAI were large venture capital funds and a handful of extremely wealthy individuals who had written large cheques years earlier, when the company was still a relatively unknown AI research lab.

By the time the world discovered ChatGPT, those early investors had already made their money. The growth that turned OpenAI into a company valued at $583 billion had happened largely out of sight, inside private markets, inaccessible to almost everyone.

This is the defining feature of private markets. The most exciting companies in the world spend the most significant years of their growth as private companies. 

Stripe, the payments company that processes hundreds of billions of dollars in transactions every year, has been private for over a decade. 

SpaceX, which is reshaping the aerospace industry with reusable rockets, has never gone public. Perplexity, one of the most interesting AI companies to emerge after ChatGPT, is still private.

By the time most of these companies do eventually go public, a large portion of the value creation has already occurred. 

Retail investors historically got access only at the end, after the most dramatic growth was behind the company.

Option to invest in Privae Markets change that.