ROFR’d

Pre-IPO Secondaries • June 2026 • 3 min read

A Promoter at Miami Swim Week Pitched Me Anthropic Paper.

The Note

I was at Miami Swim Week last week and instead of getting pitched a bottle of 1942 I was getting pitched a block of Anthropic. Promoters have officially entered the secondaries game. This has gone too far.

The question of how we got here has an answer, and Thomas Laffont put it on a single slide. Eight percent. That is the percentage of unicorns that ever become a $10 billion company. Decacorn to $100 billion: 13%. Centacorn to a trillion: 31%. The odds get better as you go up. The hardest jump is the first one.

Then the slide that actually mattered. The pre-2021 unicorn cohort was 73 companies. Twenty quarters later, 80% had raised or exited. Healthy. The 2021 cohort was 479 companies. Twenty quarters later, less than 20% had moved. That is the entire secondaries thesis in two numbers. Four hundred and seventy nine unicorns minted at the top, four out of five frozen, and the LPs who funded them are now five years into a fund that has not returned a dollar. That is the call we keep getting. That is the tender we keep pricing. That is the continuation vehicle the GP is “exploring options around.” Laffont called it “the health of our ecosystem.” That is a generous phrase for what is actually a graveyard with a marketing department.

The 8/13/31 sequence also explains why the AI book trades where it does. Coatue is not pretending the 2021 cohort is the opportunity. They write the Anthropic check at $900 billion because 31% beats 8% every day. The buyers have the slide. They are not paying for the unicorn. They are paying for the 31%.

SpaceX is the 31% made literal. The company priced its IPO at $135 this week. No range. No bookbuild. One number, take it or leave it. $1.77 trillion implied. $75 billion raise on 555,555,555 shares. Someone thinks they are funny.

The amended S-1 told you everything. Google is paying SpaceX $920 million a month for access to 110,000 Nvidia GPUs, running October 2026 through June 2029 — roughly $30 billion over the term. Stack the Anthropic contract on top, $1.25 billion a month through 2029, and SpaceX is running north of $25 billion in annualized AI compute revenue before a single rocket leaves the ground. The rocket company is a GPU landlord. The GPU landlord is going public Thursday.

The index mechanics guarantee the rest. Nasdaq compressed its inclusion window to 15 trading days. CRSP and FTSE Russell moved to five. North of $13 trillion in passive AUM becomes a forced buyer within weeks of the first trade. Forced bidders against a fixed price. The prospectus is a formality. The buyers were lined up before the document was filed.

Which is why, this week, I also fielded three separate introductions from Asian family offices wanting into Anthropic. Serious money. One conversation started at nine figures. The offer was not subtle: take our capital, spin up a US vehicle, put us in the round, and keep a few million for yourself. They cannot pass KYC on their own and they know it, so they are looking for someone to launder the access, not the money. I declined. The name is hot enough that people are flying across oceans and writing checks to intermediaries just to get into the room. When someone is offering you millions of dollars to do paperwork, the paperwork is not the point.

Back to Miami. The promoter knew the name, knew the rough valuation, knew someone who knew someone. He had done more homework than most of the people who email me a screenshot of a cap table and call it deal flow. Which means either this market has never been more accessible or it has never been more dangerous, and I am no longer sure those are different things.

Eight percent. Don’t worry about it.

— D

Deals

Supply

OpenAI

Together AI

Panthalassa

Crusoe

Prometheus

Fluidstack

ByteDance L1

Demand

Ayar Labs

Anduril

Isomorphic Labs

Physical Intelligence

Waymo

You know a name I should? Hit reply.

— D

Issue #5

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Promoters have officially entered the secondaries game.

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