GoKawiilGlen Anderson has been brokering trades in private company shares since 2010, back when the number of institutional investors focused on the late-stage private market could be counted on two hands. Today, he says, there are thousands.
As president of the investment bank Rainmaker Securities, which focuses solely on private securities markets and facilitates transactions in roughly 1,000 stocks, Anderson has a front-row seat to one of the most nail-bitingly large moments in the history of the secondary market. And right now, he suggests, the narrative has three main characters: Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX.
The upshot: the storyline is more complicated than the headlines suggest.
Anderson’s read on Anthropic is consistent with what Bloomberg reported earlier this week: demand for the company’s shares has become almost insatiable. Bloomberg quoted Ken Smythe, founder and CEO of Next Round Capital, saying that buyers had indicated to his outfit that they had $2 billion of cash ready to deploy into Anthropic, even as roughly $600 million in OpenAI shares that investors are trying to sell haven’t found takers.
Anderson sees something similar at Rainmaker. “The hardest stock to source in our marketplace is Anthropic,” he told TechCrunch yesterday afternoon from his Miami home. “There’s just no sellers.”
Part of what turbocharged that demand, Anderson argues, was Anthropic’s very public standoff with the Department of Defense — a turn of events that initially seemed like bad news for the company but has wound up becoming a gift.
“The app got more popular, people rallied around the company as kind of a hero, taking on big government,” he said. “I think it amplified the story and made it even more differentiated from OpenAI.”
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