Private Markets are not for everyone. It is worth being direct about this.

You need capital you can genuinely lock away for five to seven years without needing it for anything else. Not money you might use for a home, or your child’s education, or an emergency. A capital that can sit completely untouched for a long time.

You need to be able to absorb the total loss of that investment without it hurting you financially. Private companies can fail. Even well-funded, credible, hyped companies can fail. Losing the entire amount you put in is a real possibility, not a remote theoretical one.

Private Markets should be a small slice of a larger, already-diversified portfolio. Five to ten per cent at most. They are not a starting point. They are something you add once a solid foundation is already in place in public markets.

For investors who meet those criteria, the opportunity is real. Owning a piece of OpenAI, Stripe, SpaceX, or Perplexity before any of them went public is something retail investors simply did not have access to until recently. When these investments work out, the returns can be exceptional. But they demand patience, genuine risk tolerance, and clear eyes about everything that can go wrong.