Hi, it’s Amanda Gerut, filling in for Allie. AJ Scaramucci’s collectibles company paid $2 million for a first-appearance Iron Man comic. It also bought a record-setting Pokémon card.
Ask him about them, and the conversation circles back to a problem everyone reading this knows well. It can take a very long time for a startup to go public.
In Scaramucci’s case, he wants to give ordinary investors a shot at a market they’ve been locked out of, which is art, dinosaur bones, trading cards, and other expensive collectibles. He connected that exposure to a problem he sees with early value-creation: It often remains locked away inside venture and growth-equity portfolios rather than public markets, as my colleague, business editor Nick Lichtenberg, learned when he interviewed Scaramucci for his exclusive story yesterday.
Scaramucci’s venture firm, Solari Capital, emerged from stealth on Thursday with $350 million deployed since its founding across early-stage deals, late-stage growth, and companies it incubates in-house. His backers include SV Angel founder Ron Conway, Breyer Capital’s Jim Breyer, Bain Capital co-chairman Stephen Pagliuca, former Alphabet chief executive Eric Schmidt, and entrepreneur and author Peter Diamandis. Scaramucci is the son of SkyBridge Capital founder Anthony Scaramucci.
As Nick reported, Solari Capital’s big idea is what Scaramucci calls “programmable reality.” The argument is that compounding computing power will make biology, intelligence, physical matter, and money engineerable the way software is. His portfolio is a show-and-tell of how programmable reality works: xAI (now inside SpaceX), Suno, Tessera Therapeutics, Varda Space, and Northwood Space.
But the part of Scaramucci’s pitch I kept coming back to in reading through Nick’s notes was the narrower one. Companies used to reach an IPO in about four years, he told Nick, and now it takes 12 to 15.
Data backs him up. University of Florida professor Jay Ritter, known as Mr. IPO, says that the median VC-backed tech company was six to nine years old when it went public for most of the ’90s. (The median dropped to four in 1999 during the dot-com bubble.) In 2024, the median age was 13.5 and last year it was 12.
Fewer companies are going public, to boot. Ritter shows 34 tech listings in 2025 compared to 205 in 1995. The listings are also a lot bigger. Last year’s median VC-backed tech IPO had about $132 million in trailing revenue, compared to about $40 million in 1995, both figures adjusted for inflation. Lots of growth is happening before public investors ever get a shot at buying in.
If you look at Solari’s portfolio with all that in mind, a desire to shorten the wait and unlock the doors gets clearer. Fission Labs tokenizes shares of private companies so they can trade on a secondary market. Architect Financial is a derivatives exchange built for the AI economy. Solari’s flagship incubation, Radial Health, appears on the Nasdaq Private Market as a pre-IPO name.
Anyone in venture right now knows that investors are waiting years longer to get liquidity and their money back. Tokenized private shares and holy grail collectibles are both ways to give more people access to assets the wealthy already own. Although it’s not clear to me how easy it will be to sell and price the assets—or the going rate for dinosaur-bone shares—I’m interested to see what happens with Solari.
See you next time,
Amanda [email protected]
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