How We Take the Toast to a Big IPO Year

We have a half-joking toast inside the firm: may every founder here average three to ten IPOs.

Our position first: this is a toast, not a forecast. We do not predict when the window opens, and we do not set ourselves a table to be graded against by year. What we can actually hold in our hands is only three things: an empty cup, good assets, zero froth.

Zero froth is not dodging froth

So what does zero froth mean? Not waiting for a clean year before acting. In a hot year good assets are almost all bid up at the same time, and the denominator decides that: much money, few targets. The real gaps hide at the points of divergence — the small set with a high threshold of understanding, obscured by an assumption, and therefore not yet bid up. Our method is clumsy. Within one direction we rank the assets by heat, then rank them again by fundamentals, and we stop only where the two lists disagree. That is our ruler.

What is scarce has always been the asset

Why do good assets sit in the middle of those three? Because what is scarce has always been the asset, not the capital. Money is cyclical: in a hurry this year, perhaps not next. Good companies are structural: someone competes for them in every round. Same table, a different set of players next year. Betting on the capital side is renting someone else's cycle. Betting on the asset side is building your own account. So we take only twenty to thirty mandates a year, half new and half existing clients coming back for the next round. People can grow in number. Deals cannot.

The empty cup guards against itchy hands. When a theme takes off, the most comfortable move is to pivot into it. But the playbook in a hot direction is usually public, and once the playbook is public the contest falls back to compute and capital — the square where a startup is worst off. Holding the main line means sitting on the cold bench for a while. But the cold bench is cheaper than chasing the top.

Then why the urgency? Because the distribution channels are already built. Good things spread far faster than they did a generation ago — a few months and they cover the world.

The weekly meeting is a cleansing of the mind, and a dispatch desk

A word on our weekly meeting. We have one fixed move every week: each person raises exactly one thing — what resource you need. First, long report-style narration adds almost no information in a group setting, because nobody can act on it afterwards. The weekly is not a stage. It is a dispatch desk. Second, that fixed move handles something else — what goes first in cross-city collaboration is not information, it is familiarity, and familiarity sets the threshold for asking help. Seeing each other's faces once a week produces nothing directly. But when something goes wrong, a hand reaches out.

Here is how we take that toast: we accept it, and keep the homework. The only three things we can decide for ourselves are understanding, matching and closing. As for how many finally happen? Ask us on settlement day.

(For the three-part discipline and the positioning statement, see the "2026-08-16 Archive entry update".)