Solari Capital’s $350M Bet: Why Companies Stay Private Longer
The public market is being fed the leftovers. Solari Capital’s $350 million launch is a blunt reminder that serious wealth creation now happens long before ordinary investors can buy in.
The public market is being fed the leftovers. Solari Capital’s $350 million launch is a blunt reminder that the serious wealth creation now happens long before ordinary investors can buy in.
That is not a complaint about rich people getting richer. It is a warning to founders, operators and anyone building a portfolio: the old script — build a company, list it, let public investors join the ride — has been broken for years. The money is staying private, the companies are getting older, and the gap between creating value and accessing it is widening.
Solari Capital has already deployed $350 million
On September 24, AJ Scaramucci brought Solari Capital out of stealth after deploying roughly $350 million across early-stage investments, later-stage growth deals and businesses incubated in-house. Its approved backers include Ron Conway, Jim Breyer, Stephen Pagliuca, Eric Schmidt and Peter Diamandis. That is not a bunch of mates passing the hat around. It is a properly connected capital base backing a very deliberate wager.
Scaramucci calls the thesis “programmable reality”: the idea that compounding computing power turns intelligence, biology, physical matter and finance into things that can increasingly be engineered rather than merely managed.
The phrase is a bit Silicon Valley, admittedly. But the portfolio is more useful than the slogan. Solari has positions spanning xAI, Suno, Varda Space, Base Power, Northwood Space, Giga Energy and finance infrastructure such as Fission Labs. In plain English: AI, space, energy, robotics, life sciences and the plumbing that may let private assets trade more freely.
The important part is not whether you enjoy the phrase “programmable reality.” It is that Solari is behaving like a firm that believes the biggest outcomes will emerge where software collides with the real world — electricity, factories, satellites, drugs, money and machines.
That is where the next decade’s hard work is. It is also where most founders underestimate how long, expensive and operationally brutal success will be.
The real story is the 12-year wait for liquidity
Solari’s launch matters because it arrives in a market where the finish line has moved.
University of Florida professor Jay Ritter’s IPO data shows the median VC-backed technology company that went public in 2024 was 13.5 years old. In 2025, it was 12 years. During much of the 1990s, the comparable companies were generally six to nine years old when they listed. In 1999, during peak dot-com nonsense, the median was four years.
You do not need a PhD in finance to understand what changed. Companies are staying private far longer. By the time they reach public markets, a lot of the mad growth — and a lot of the upside — has already been captured by founders, employees, venture funds, growth funds and secondary buyers.
Fortune reports there were 34 tech listings in 2025, compared with 205 in 1995. The median VC-backed technology IPO in 2025 also came with roughly $132 million in trailing revenue, adjusted for inflation, versus about $40 million in 1995.
That means today’s IPO is less of a starting gun and more of a graduation ceremony. Public investors are being offered more mature businesses, which is sensible in one way. But they are also missing the chaotic early years when a $50 million valuation turns into $5 billion.
I have got no issue with founders and early investors making money. They took the risk. But we should call the system what it is: private capital has become a much bigger gatekeeper of who gets to participate in wealth creation.
Why this is great for some founders — and dangerous for others
The comfortable story is that staying private gives founders more control. Sometimes it does.
A private company can invest through a rough patch without being smashed by a quarterly earnings call. It can build infrastructure, fund research and make long-horizon bets without a mob of short-term traders demanding immediate proof of life. For businesses tackling AI infrastructure, energy systems, robotics or biotech, that patience can be a genuine competitive advantage.
But private capital is not charitable capital. It is patient right up until it isn’t.
The longer a company stays private, the more complex its cap table becomes. More preferred shares. More investor rights. More secondary transactions. More pressure to keep the valuation story intact. More employees sitting on paper wealth they cannot readily turn into school fees, a house deposit or actual freedom.
Founders love to say they are building for the long term. Fine. Then build a company that deserves a long term — with revenue quality, margins, governance and a product customers would genuinely miss. Do not use “we are staying private longer” as a classy way of saying “we are not ready for scrutiny.”
That distinction matters. The best companies remain private because they have strong options. The weaker ones remain private because public markets would expose the gap between their narrative and their economics.
The overlooked angle: secondaries are becoming part of the operating system
Solari’s interest in Fission Labs, which focuses on tokenised private-company shares for secondary trading, points to the pressure building underneath this market.
If companies now stay private for 12 years or more, investors and employees need ways to get liquidity before an IPO or acquisition. Secondaries are no longer an obscure side hustle for rich people with complicated spreadsheets. They are becoming a structural feature of venture.
That creates opportunity, but do not get carried away.
Liquidity is not the same thing as a liquid market. A share in a private company can be difficult to value, difficult to sell and subject to transfer restrictions. Tokenising it does not magically make it safe, cheap or transparent. You can put a bad asset on a blockchain; it remains a bad asset, just with better branding.
Still, the underlying direction is obvious. When private-market holding periods stretch, systems that let employees, founders and early investors sell a portion of their stakes become more valuable. The winners will not merely create slick marketplaces. They will solve the boring but essential problems: compliance, company approvals, pricing, custody, buyer quality and information asymmetry.
Boring is where the money often is.
Don’t confuse a $350 million war chest with proof
Here is the contrarian bit. A $350 million deployment figure and a celebrity-grade investor list are impressive, but neither tells you whether a venture firm will produce exceptional returns.
Venture has always been a business where a handful of winners carry the portfolio. The danger in broad “everything is becoming programmable” thinking is that it can become an excuse to buy every fashionable thing with a chip, a model or a robot attached to it.
AI is real. Better compute changes what businesses can do. But the word “AI” does not repair a bad sales process, a weak moat, a commodity product or founders who cannot recruit adults capable of disagreeing with them.
The same goes for space, defence, energy and biotech. These are massive markets with genuine technological tailwinds. They are also capital-intensive, regulated and littered with businesses that looked inevitable in a pitch deck and very mortal in the real world.
The test for Solari — and every firm chasing the physical-world AI boom — is simple: can it identify businesses with a path from technical possibility to repeatable commercial outcomes? Not demos. Not press. Not a valuation marked up by the same small circle of late-stage funds.
Revenue. Retention. Gross margin. Regulatory progress. Deployment speed. Cash discipline. Those are still the grown-up questions.
What this means for you
If you are a founder, stop treating an IPO as your business plan. Build as if you may be private for 12 years. That means taking governance seriously earlier, keeping the cap table clean, setting sensible employee-equity expectations and making sure your unit economics do not rely on the next heroic funding round.
If you are an operator, ask harder questions about equity. What class of shares do you hold? What happens in a secondary sale? Is there a realistic path to liquidity? A large option grant at a headline valuation is not cash. It is a high-risk, long-dated call option with paperwork.
If you are an investor, do not chase private-market access merely because public markets feel late to the party. Access without diligence is just a more expensive way to make a bad decision. Understand the company, the share class, the fees, the transfer rules and the absence of reliable pricing before you touch it.
And if you run a business, take the bigger lesson from Solari’s bet. The most valuable companies over the next decade will not just write software. They will use software to improve expensive, awkward, real-world systems: how power is produced, how factories run, how money moves, how medicines are developed and how people work.
That is where the opportunity is. But it will not reward tourists. Build something customers pay for, keep your capital structure sane, and make sure the story still works when the money gets tight. That is how you stay in the game long enough to own the upside.