Before the Bell

A generation ago, anyone with a brokerage account could own the great companies of their era almost from the start.

Today, wealth creation is far more exclusive.

Larger pools of private capital have let the best companies in the world stay private for longer, and most of their growth now happens before even a sophisticated individual investor can access a single share.

The great companies of the last generation went public small.

Adjusted for inflation, Amazon listed in 1997 at under $1 billion, PayPal in 2002 at about $1.4 billion, Microsoft in 1986 at about $1.6 billion, Apple in 1980 at about $7 billion and Google in 2004 at about $40 billion.

Even Facebook, the largest listing of its time in 2012, came to market at about $150 billion.

Anyone who bought at listing got most of the growth that followed.

Their successors are arriving as giants, or not arriving at all.

SpaceX listed in June at $1.77 trillion, already one of the ten largest companies in the US, and Anthropic is aiming for $1.7 to 2 trillion in November.

The next generation of social media, payments, financial services and defense, ByteDance ($550 billion), Stripe ($159 billion), Revolut ($115 billion) and Anduril (about $90 billion), are each worth many times what their predecessors were at listing, and none has yet gone public.

We believe this pattern will continue to hold for the coming decades.

As AI, robotics and other technologies accelerate, private companies at the cutting edge will disrupt traditional businesses faster and more completely than ever, creating extraordinary value in short periods of time. Most of that value will be captured in the private markets.

Historically, only institutions with deep pockets or the right relationships have had access to these private markets. At Access, we’ve set out to change that. It isn’t easy, but it is too valuable to ignore.

‍So what stands in the way for individual investors?

First, Access. Individual investors have very little visibility into private markets. When they do see some opportunities, they need a full-time team to work out which ones are worth doing.

We source opportunities from a network of experts who see the best private companies early and bring us into them.

Second, Deal Selection. Once you solve for access, filtering for quality is the harder hurdle.

At Access, every opportunity goes through a rigorous investment process. We see more than 1,000 a year and invest in about 10.

Third, Size. Direct access often requires minimum investments of millions of dollars, far more than most individuals can put into a single company. We pool members into one investment, so each can take an allocation that suits them.‍

Fourth, Execution. A seamless investment process, followed by real post-investment service. We handle the paperwork, keep you close to every company you own and manage each investment through to exit, all from your phone.

We set out to solve a practical problem of access and asset allocation.

But somewhere along the way, our ‘clients’ became a community of friends and co-investors, who found comfort not just in each other's investment ideas, but also in their company and friendship.

By accident, we built the best part, and are now open to growing it.

More on that later.