Why Private, Why Now

The Stock Market Is Half the Size It Used to Be

The pool of publicly traded companies in the U.S. is roughly half the size it was two decades ago. At the same time, the companies that do stay private are staying private far longer. The median age of a U.S. company at IPO was five years in 1999. By 2024, it had reached 14 years.

That shift changes everything about how value is created — and who gets to participate.

When Amazon went public in 1997, it had existed for just three years. Its market cap at IPO was a few hundred million dollars. Nearly all of its value was created after it became publicly traded, in full view of anyone willing to buy the stock. That era is largely over.

Today, companies are scaling, maturing, and compounding in private markets — for years, sometimes decades — before public investors ever see them. By the time you can buy shares on an exchange, the steepest part of the value-creation curve has often already passed.

SpaceX is the clearest current example. It didn’t become a historically significant company on IPO day. It became one over the last two decades, while it was private. The IPO makes the story available to everyone. But the story itself was written long before.

What a Public-Only Portfolio Is Missing

This isn’t an argument that public markets are bad. They’re not. Broad index funds are cheap, accessible, and sensible for the core of most portfolios.

The question is whether a public-only portfolio is complete.

Consider the kinds of companies that define the next generation of technology, healthcare, defense, and infrastructure — Stripe, Anduril, Databricks, Anthropic, Rippling. The top 50 private companies are now worth an estimated $2.5 trillion combined. None of that value is accessible through a brokerage account.

There are, in practice, three equity markets today. Public equities — the world of index funds, ETFs, and daily liquidity — are still the largest by far. Late-stage private companies are scaled businesses approaching public markets, often available only through secondaries and private funds. And early-stage venture is the power-law bucket, where most companies fail and a small number drive nearly all the returns.

A portfolio built entirely in the first bucket has no exposure to the second or third. That’s not a diversification problem in the traditional sense. It’s a coverage problem.

Why Most People Haven’t Done Anything About It

The honest answer is that access to private markets has been genuinely hard to come by — by design.

For most of venture capital’s history, the LP base was institutions: sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, endowments, and family offices. These are organizations that could write checks large enough to matter, had long enough time horizons to tolerate illiquidity, and had the relationships to get a seat at the table.

Individual investors, no matter how sophisticated, largely didn’t fit that model. Top venture rounds are competitive. Companies at the growth stage have the leverage to choose their investors — and they often choose partners who bring strategic value, not just capital. An individual writing a single check rarely moves the needle for a company that’s already raised hundreds of millions of dollars.

The result was a system that was functionally closed to most people — not because of a rule, but because of how private markets are structured.

How Alumni Ventures Opens the Door

Alumni Ventures was built specifically to solve this problem — and has spent more than a decade earning the relationships and reputation needed to actually do it.

AV is now recognized as one of the most active venture firms in North America, ranked among the top 20 VCs by TIME and CB Insights.* That standing, built over 10-plus years and backed by a network of over 850,000 innovation enthusiasts, is what helps AV allocation in competitive rounds. It’s what puts AV at the table alongside firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Benchmark, Khosla, and Accel — and what allows individual investors to come along.

There are two ways to access that deal flow:

AV evaluates thousands of opportunities for every one or two it invests in — so by the time a deal reaches syndicate members, it’s already passed a rigorous internal review.

For investors interested specifically in late-stage and pre-IPO companies — the Stripe/SpaceX/Databricks segment of the private market — PrePublic Equity Partners (PEP), an independent affiliate of Alumni Ventures that focuses exclusively on this space through secondary-market investing. PEP recently completed its first investment in SpaceX. Qualified investors can learn more at pep.fund.

Education and a Real Team Are Part of the Product

One reason many investors haven’t moved into private markets isn’t access — it’s confidence. Venture capital has its own language, its own mechanics, and its own risk profile. It’s not complicated, but it does require a foundation.

That’s why AV Academy exists.

AV Academy is a free curriculum built by the same team that manages AV’s funds — approximately 40 full-time venture investing professionals, including CEO Mike Collins and CIO Mark Edwards. It covers four tracks: how venture capital works, how returns are generated, how VCs evaluate deals, and how to invest through AV specifically.

It’s available in three formats. Self-paced online courses take about three to four hours and are available anytime. Monthly live webinar sessions run four weeks on Zoom with AV investment professionals available to answer questions in real time. And in-person bootcamps are held in major cities — New York, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, and others — for investors who want an immersive half-day experience with AV’s leadership team.

None of it is a prerequisite. You don’t have to finish a course to invest. But the option to learn — at whatever pace and in whatever format works for you — is built into the experience, not added on afterward.

And when you’re ready to talk through your specific situation, AV’s Senior Partner team is available for a direct conversation about whether and how venture fits your portfolio.

Course 1 | Course 2 | Course 3 | Course 4

About Your Instructors

*AV has received several awards from national outlets and organizations, recognizing our distinct model and the quality and breadth of our investment activity. See Alumni Ventures’ Awards & Rankings.

Alumni Ventures and its personnel provide investment advice only to affiliated venture capital funds. Nothing in this post is personalized advice for any reader. Venture capital investing involves substantial risk, including risk of loss of all capital invested. AV Academy is offered for informational purposes only. Alumni Ventures and PrePublic Equity Partners (PEP) are separate, independent entities; any offering by PEP is made solely by PEP pursuant to its own offering materials.

Alumni Ventures and its personnel provide investment advice only to affiliated venture capital funds. Nothing in this post is personalized advice for any reader. Venture capital investing involves substantial risk, including risk of loss of all capital invested. AV Academy is offered for informational purposes only. Prepublic Equity Partners, LLC is an affiliate of Alumni Ventures, but operates independently in several respects including with respect to investment selection. An investment with Alumni Ventures or its funds will not confer direct exposure to PEP portfolio companies.

This communication is from Alumni Ventures, a for-profit venture capital company that is not affiliated with or endorsed by any school. It is not personalized advice, and AV only provides advice to its client funds. This communication is neither an offer to sell, nor a solicitation of an offer to purchase, any security. Such offers are made only pursuant to the formal offering documents for the fund(s) concerned, and describe significant risks and other material information that should be carefully considered before investing. For additional information, please see here. Achievement of investment objectives, including any amount of investment return, cannot be guaranteed. Co-investors are shown for illustrative purposes only, do not reflect all organizations with which AV co-invests, and do not necessarily indicate future co-investors. Example portfolio companies shown are not available to future investors, except potentially in the case of follow-on investments. Venture capital investing involves substantial risk, including risk of loss of all capital invested. Diversification cannot prevent investment loss; it is a strategy to mitigate investment risk. This communication includes forward-looking statements, generally consisting of any statement pertaining to any issue other than historical fact, including without limitation predictions, financial projections, the anticipated results of the execution of any plan or strategy, the expectation or belief of the speaker, or other events or circumstances to exist in the future. Forward-looking statements are not representations of actual fact, depend on certain assumptions that may not be realized, and are not guaranteed to occur. Any forward-looking statements included in this communication speak only as of the date of the communication. AV and its affiliates disclaim any obligation to update, amend, or alter such forward-looking statements, whether due to subsequent events, new information, or otherwise.