Adventures in Private Investing, Pt I-Space and Defense

Without full-time trading, time has really opened up for me. I could gear down a bit—binge HBO, play pool, focus on dad duty—and convince myself that the work is done. I could declare to all within earshot: “I am done trying to grow the pile of paper!”

But I’m not done yet.

No, I’ve been working on something quietly—something I haven’t shared—until now. This is the third¹ act: first it was poker, then it was day trading, and now private investing, where I’ve spent the last 15 months going all in.

I have now funded investments in 24 different private companies. Some of these companies are now household names with billions in revenue and thousands of employees. Others were founded just months ago and have zero revenue. One, in particular, is worth billions and they haven’t even publicly disclosed a product yet. These are illiquid investments where I can’t just hit the bids to get my cash back as if they’re on the NASDAQ. No takebacks because I am committed. I might have gotten a little cuckoo for coco puffs.

There’s basically two distinct categories of private companies you can invest in–pre-IPO stage companies and true venture companies. At first, I thought I was just a pre-IPO guy who wanted mature companies with visible financials and growing revenue. Then I’d flip the stock out at peak IPO hype. That’s the safe play, supposedly. Then I decided, why the fuck not??? Let’s go crazy and do pure venture on top of that, just for fun². These are companies that are just mere concepts or stories, also known as the pre-revenue stage. I went from a very conservative investor to an aggressive one who feels the need to act with urgency before “it’s too late.” If that sounds FOMO-ey and dangerous and risky, maybe it is.

I don’t know even where to begin, I’ll just walk you through the world of pre-IPO investing first. Keep in mind that as you read this, I am not a professional or credentialed investor in any way or form. I don’t have an MBA or even an undergraduate business degree. Prior to 2024, all I did was invest in index funds and occasionally get lucky on an SPV or two–otherwise, I don’t have much of a long-term self-managed track record. I’ve been learning on the fly and I’ll make my share of mistakes. I’m probably just a know-nothing bum with no real skills to create or source long-term value–please keep that mind as you peruse through this post, which may come off as a day trader LARP-ing as a venture capitalist. My investments are not recommendations. Don’t read this as a guide to success—it might just be a roadmap to wrecking your car.

You’ve been warned, now we can start.

The World of Pre-IPO Investing

Pre-IPO investing is weird. It sits in a strange middle ground between venture capital and public markets. It’s not really advertised—most of the deal flow moves through small email newsletters, broker relationships, or private networks of investors. Access is usually limited to accredited investors ³under securities exemptions like Regulation D. Shares aren’t publicly traded, so pricing is opaque–it’s usually anchored to the latest pricing round or tender, and then secondary supply/demand will create either a premium or discount.

The ecosystem runs on intermediaries. Secondary marketplaces like Forge Global and Nasdaq Private Market help source shares, while brokers often bundle investors into SPVs (special purpose vehicles) so dozens of buyers can appear as a single line on the company’s cap table. SPV’s aren’t just limited to secondary trading. Venture funds with direct access will also create SPVs for investors to invest along side them for individual companies while they collect carry fees⁴–this is called the co-invest model as opposed to the traditional closed-end fund model where capital is pooled and then deployed across a broad portfolio.

These SPVs can have complicated fee structures—sometimes price markup, big upfront placement fees, sometimes carried interest on profits, sometimes all of them—which can meaningfully change the economics of the investment. This is called fee drag. Getting the best deal often means maintaining multiple broker relationships and actively working the phones for the best overall deal economics—which makes it more like a 1970’s Wall Street market than a modern electronic exchange.

SPVs have become popular primarily as a cap table compression mechanism. In venture, there’s a strong preference to keep the cap table constrained—typically ~100–200 holders⁵—to maintain clean governance, minimize coordination costs, and preserve flexibility for future financings. So we can’t have Doctor, Tech Guy, Rich Lady, and Regular Joe on the cap table along with A16z and Sequoia. They’re all aggregated into SPV Inc.

Information asymmetry is high in the private world. Private companies don’t have to publish standardized financials, so investors often rely on partial data—leaked revenue numbers, new contract PRs, and rumors from news outlets like The Information—to estimate what a company might be worth. Real information remains highly guarded, often passed through phone calls rather than written communication. Pitch decks and underwriting memo’s usually come with a confidentiality agreement.

Recently, there’s been a small push to democratize access to this world for non-qualified investors. Companies like Robinhood and Fundrise have established funds that give everyday investors indirect exposure to private companies through publically-traded vehicles. The pitch is that companies now stay private much longer, meaning the public markets often miss the steepest part of their growth curve. So if everyday Joe wants exposure to the next generation of great companies at reasonable valuations, he will need to get into these pre-IPO funds.

As of writing this, the Fundrise Innovation Fund (VCX) just went public on March 19th. Its NAV—essentially the marked value of its private holdings—is around $19 per share. VCX has since traded as high as $190+, implying roughly a 10x premium to NAV at peak levels. That kind of dislocation tells you everything: there is a massive appetite to get exposure to these elite private tech companies. Pretty timely for this post.

But the democratization is still limited. Accredited investor rules still gate most direct deals and you can’t select the companies you want via a consolidated fund. Buying VCX while it trades at a massive premium isn’t palatable either. In practice, pre-IPO investing remains a semi-private marketplace—an ecosystem of brokers, venture funds, and wealthy individuals trading slices of companies that the public may not even hear about until years later. So many trader-investor types simply won’t pay attention to this market.

I’m laying all of this out there to simply state this–in my opinion, this is the current frontier of investing. Micro-caps and crypto were frontiers over ten years ago. Online poker was a frontier twenty years ago. Those aren’t frontiers anymore, now they’re petered out gold mines where you’re digging for the scraps. I’m planting my flag on this frontier while it remains uncrowded by the masses. I think there is substantial alpha out there as this current private & venture boom led by AI/Defense/Robotics/Space themes will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I feel I have to invest my money now before valuations get too excessive because the best private companies usually only move in one direction in future valuations–which is up, up, up.

Why Go Private? Why Invest in Tech?

Why invest in private? More than ever, the most significant value creation from unicorn tech companies happens while they’re still private. This is when revenue goes from $0 to $100 million—when product-market fit happens, the business model proves itself, and the risk-adjusted return starts to shift in investors’ favor. Decades ago companies went public much earlier. Today they stay private longer, raising massive rounds from venture funds, sovereign wealth funds, and other major institutions. Capital markets for private venture has grown much deeper than even just 5-10 years ago. By the time these generational companies finally IPO, a huge chunk of the explosive growth has already happened behind closed doors. The average non-qualified investor only gets access after years of compounding have already occurred—often capturing modest, market-like beta returns at best, rather than the life-changing 10-100x multiples.

Why invest in tech? Right now we’re at a critical point where advances in compute power is making the impossible possible. GPUs, gigawatt-level datacenters, and frontier models have turned software into something that can reason, design, and automate work that once required teams of humans. All of it runs on the same underlying stack: compute, energy, and data. When compute gets 10x cheaper and more powerful, whole industries that were once science projects suddenly become commercial markets. That’s why the frontier of technology right now isn’t just apps or software-only anymore—it’s physical world tech: AI labs, neoclouds, robotics, space infrastructure, and next-gen energy systems powering it all.

Consider the concept of neural networks. The core ideas were discovered decades ago and lived mostly in academic papers and niche applications, because the compute simply wasn’t there to make them practical. For nearly 40 years, they sat as an interesting theoretical concept rather than a world-changing real life application. Then GPUs—originally built to render video game graphics—turned out to be perfectly suited for the massive matrix operations that neural networks require. Once that compute unlocked the architecture, the same old idea suddenly became the foundation for modern deep learning and the building blocks of today’s large language models like GPT, Claude, and Gemini. If you’re interested in a deep dive on the key players who created neural networks and generative AI, check out my friend Pat’s video on the subject.⁶

Technology’s share of the S&P 500’s market capitalization has steadily climbed across decades and then it nearly doubled in the 2020’s.

This trend of tech concentration is the result of the innovative breakthroughs of the time, which subsequently drive the defining consumer and enterprise products of the decade. You can almost see how each layer stacks on top of the last, acting as a force multiplier that accelerates everything that follows.

Right now the market continually focuses on the so-called “Magnificent 7”⁷—the dominant tech names that effectively are the U.S. market. They’re the compounders, the “grow forever” machines, the truly generational companies that everyone has to buy from and everyone wants to work for. Years from now, that list might expand to a Terrific 12 or a Fantastic 15. The question is: how do you find one of those ultra-mega-corns before they IPO? What is the best point to invest in these companies?

What exactly is that critical inflection point where a company starts to add surplus value and greatly increase its survivability prospects? It’s when the company establishes entrenched product-market fit–basically, they can sell their goods or services hand over fist. This is where we want to invest.

⁸This is my game plan: I’m trying to invest in future generational companies when they’re hitting that key inflection point. I can invest earlier or later than that point but this is now the new mental investing model for me. It’s a mental model I adapted from a venture firm’s deck I saw sometime last year. Before that, I was kind of just investing on feel.

A Journey to Outer Space

It’s time to get into the weeds and talk about some of my personal individual investments. The first one in the portfolio is a space/internet/AI company called SpaceX. I got into a SpaceX SPV in the June 2024 at a valuation of $210 billion. If you recall my ABNB post, I began SPV business with a Chicago-based company that offered me a piece of the RDDT IPO. They later offered me shares of SpaceX that they got through the company’s tender. ⁹

Because these deals move fast, I basically had a week to become a tourist in space and decide if this made sense. One thing felt clear from the color commentary from my brokers: SpaceX wasn’t IPO’ing anytime soon—probably 5–10 years—so this wasn’t meant to be seen as a quick flip. The real question was simple: am I willing to own the leading space company for the long haul, maybe even for life?

I gave it my best shot to turbo-learn the entire history of the company and study what they do. Previously, I just knew they made rocketships and that was about it. The SPV manager shared a pitch deck with some projections, and around the same time I also watched Wild Wild Space, an excellent HBO documentary on the space industry. Although it focused on 3 smaller companies¹⁰, the extraneous commentary from everyone involved suggested that SpaceX was multiple generations ahead in all critical technologies. They were the first to vertically land a rocket back on Earth, which was proof of concept that they could greatly reduce launch costs. Nobody else came close, not Bezos Blue Origin, not the United Launch Alliance backed by Boeing and Lockheed, not the Russians nor the Chinese. SpaceX were masters in rocketry. I don’t know if launch will ultimately make tons of money, especially if its geared for an amibitious humanities mission like Mars but StarLink, SpaceX’s satelitte internet business, was in the midst of becoming a massive cash cow.

Here was my mental underwriting of SpaceX: there’s a small chance of truly outsized, lifetime gains, a very high chance it simply outperforms the market, and almost no chance of a zero. It’s just too far ahead in a mission-critical sector to fail outright. I’m also of the belief that it’s never a bad idea to invest in an industry leader because you’re buying into frontier innovation and proven execution¹¹. At this stage, it felt like a better bet than adding more to my Mag-7 holdings.¹². I had to add it to my portfolio and let it play out—IPO or not. Plus, I was told there could be opportunities to sell in future company tenders, so there was at least some built-in exit optionality that didn’t exist in smaller, less liquid companies.

Although SpaceX carried tremendous respect from investors, the rest of the sector did not have much going for it in 2024. The early space-market hype from the 2021–2022 bull run had all but completely faded. ASTS was at $11, RKLB around $5 post-SPAC¹³, PL traded at $2, Astra had gone bankrupt, and SPCE, one of the early hype names from 2021, was down ~90% from its highs. Bearish articles painted the sector as a graveyard of capital where small players burnt cash in a vain effort to fight over whatever scraps SpaceX didn’t take. All investors could see was risk, dilution, and endless cash burn.

If you’ve read some of my posts on junk stocks, you know how quickly sentiment can change though. At the present moment in 2026, the space sector couldn’t be more alive.

Today, ASTS trades at $95, a 9x. RKLB trades at $75, a 15x multiple. PL trades at $25, a 12x multiple. Space is hot again.

Oh and instead of waiting for a possible Mars landing to IPO, which would be at least 10 years out, Elon Musk unexpectedly declared that SpaceX would IPO this year. It’s expected to be priced around $1.5 trillion dollars after their merger with xAI. This IPO will be vital towards new funds that will unlock their supposed datacenter buildout in space. There are new narratives about things that weren’t talked about two years ago. We might mine asteroids for rare earth minerals. One day there might be more datacenters in space than on land. When sentiment changes for the better, new exciting narratives become the norm.

In the true venture world, there are smaller space companies trying to do all kinds of interesting things. I don’t know enough science to say if they are actual possibilities or just pure moonshots. I get e-mailed offerings on them periodically–here’s a sample:

Nonetheless, while I am very excited about these new developments, I’m not sure now is the moment to pile into space. I’m still bullish, but you have to be selective—maybe smaller private companies like Stoke Space are interesting at the right valuation, or maybe we get another dip that offers better long-term entry point. 2024 to early 2025 was the window to really lean in. Getting in after a massive sector-wide valuation boom is certainly a lot riskier. Right now, there is still a lot of some of these smaller companies have to prove, in both engineering and economic feasibility.

Relationship Building

My first SPV broker was an NYC broker-dealer called Meridian Investments¹⁴. My ex-roommate used to work there. I bought into ABNB and PLTR in 2015. You can read about that whole story in this post. They’ve been around for a long time and were part of the first wave of SPV’s with the Facebook and Twitter IPO’s. They have a lot of deals–some good, some not so good–and usually some of the highest fee structures out there.

My second SPV broker is a Chicago-based wealth management firm called Aurelius Investments¹⁵. They’re partnered with a larger asset management firm that manages a multi-billion dollar AUM. I got referred to their services through Clockwork–he knows a guy who knows a guy who works there. In 2024, I bought into their RDDT and SpaceX SPV’s. Aurelius is a top notch wealth management firm with a strong sales team, research team, and they have an incredibly competitive fee structure.

These firms don’t advertise on billboards. Regular people do not know who they are.

The best way to maximize your deal flow and minimize fee drag? Expand your rolodex. Build relationships. Gather information.

Sign up to every known secondary market platform out there: EquityZen, Hiive, Nasdaq Private Market, Forge Global, Upmarket, MicroVentures, Augment, AngelList.¹⁶ Get an idea of where the top companies are priced.

Get added to private networks of qualified investors like Long Angle.

You can even find useful people in unexpected places. I remember being on a single stock subreddit where there was a back-and-forth exchange about the stock’s valuation–one guy an investor in the stock, the other guy a troll. The troll started to brag about holding Anduril shares, a privately held defense company. Intrigued about his connections, I DM’d him. We did a quick phone call then and met for coffee a week later. His story checked out and he knew some people. He wasn’t a good guy¹⁸. To his credit, he did get me interested in Anduril. Even assholes can be useful.

The New Primes: The Next Generation of Defense Companies

The “New Primes” are what happens when Silicon Valley meets the defense industrial base. Instead of slow, cost-plus contracts and decade-long procurement cycles, these companies are building software-first, autonomous, rapidly iterating systems—and selling them in a way that looks a lot more like SaaS + hardware than traditional defense. The Old Primes (Lockheed, Northrop, Raytheon) are still designed for the old ways of war–massive, exquisite systems like fighter jets and mega carriers. The old method is plagued with long timelines and buildout costs that over-run projections on cost-plus contracts¹⁹ The New Primes are charting a different course:

Autonomous, attritable systems (drones, unmanned ships, AI software)
Speed, iteration, and deployment cycles measured in months
Fixed-price / productized offerings
Software + data as the core moat

Legacy defense has the money and relationships but the new primes have the better product for today’s war. They may be smaller but they’re focused on purpose-built products while incumbents get caught flat-footed and continue in their old stagnant ways of doing business.

So why Anduril? To first understand that, we have to first break down another company–arguably the “it-company”²⁰ of the past 2.5 years, a consulting services and software platform company called Palantir. Palantir essentially pioneered a new business operating model: Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs). Instead of building software in isolation, they embed technical teams directly alongside end users, iterating rapidly based on real-world feedback. They take a platform like Foundry and push it into every corner of an organization—systematically uncovering and creating value across workflows, not just deploying a static tool. The result is immediate, tangible ROI for the customer, paired with deep operational integration that makes the software hard to rip out. Over time, this compounds into significant switching costs and a durable moat. The world of enterprise software has taken notice that forward deployed engineers are quickly becoming the default model and it’s drawn admiration from men such as MSFT’s Satya Nadella and Y-Combinator’s Garry Tan. As of writing this, Palantir (PLTR) is worth $360 billion dollars, which makes it one of the top-30 companes by market cap in the S&P 500.

That’s what venture and hyper-growth investing are all about–finding the next iteration of the previous generational company that everyone celebrates for its success. It’s not that different from sports scouting, which I have been deeply fascinated with since I was a kid. You model these “molds” (archetypes) of proven success and break down the common factors of what makes them successful. Then you try to find these signals in the next promising 18-22 year old. NFL scouts hunt for the next Patrick Mahomes with improvisational magic and world class arm talent. NBA scouts want the next Kevin Durant with 99th percentile length and shooting ability. Maybe Caleb Williams is the next Mahomes. Maybe AJ Dybantsa is the next KD. Now all these venture folks want to find the next Palantir. There’s something deeply human about it—we’re wired to map the familiar onto the unknown and call a promising outlier “the next one.”

Some people might call Anduril the next Palantir—the most obvious connection being that both company names reference Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Both came out of the Founders Fund orbit, with figures like Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale shaping their DNA, and both share a similar operating model: win by embedding deeply with the customer through FDEs. But Anduril takes it a step further with full vertical integration—building both the software layer (Lattice) and the hardware (drones, sentries, submersibles). While legacy defense companies typically have hardware-driven gross margins around 8-10%, Anduril internally believes they can achieve 40-50% from software integration²¹. It’s no longer a question of success anymore, it’s now a question of scale. How big can they get? They just announced they expect to double their revenue to over $4 billion. They just announced a $20 billion contract with the U.S. military. There are a true 1/1 company, doing something no other private startup had ever managed to do before—successfully disrupt legacy defense.

They’ve shown it can be done. Now there are other new-age defense companies stepping up to be the next Anduril. There’s Saronic, a company that creates autonomous naval ships that can attack in swarms. There’s ShieldAI, building AI pilots for autonomous military systems in the sky. There’s Scout AI building autonomous systems to collect, process, and act on battlefield data in real time. Autonomy is the new arsenal to win tomorrow’s war.

Of all the pre-IPO names I’ve invested in, Anduril was by far the hardest to source and execute. Supply is extremely tight and almost all access comes through double-layer SPVs²². You’ll never see it on platforms like Hiive or Forge and it’s apparently a popular target for SPV fraud. Aurelius Investments, which had been involved in multiple Anduril fund raising rounds since 2023, had offered me shares at a $35 billion valuation shortly after the Series G closed. They had a $40 million block to sell to clients. I indicated interest for $400,000, which would have made it the largest single stock investment in my private portfolio. The SPV ended up being over-subscribed 5x, which pro-rated my allocation to just $80,000. It’s arguably the most in-demand private company in the entire secondary marketplace.

There are some interesting market dynamics at play here. After pricing its Series G at a $30.5B post-money valuation in May 2025, secondary trades pushed toward ~$90B by year-end—more than a 100% markup. Anduril’s latest Series H round that’s in the works suggests a valuation of $60 billion. This is well undershooting the mark of $90 bil in the secondary market and I’m not exactly sure why. Venture funds could simply eat all the supply and flip out for free markup if they want. Maybe there’s some strategic value in going lower that I don’t know about.

If Anduril gets valued the way Palantir does—with extremely high premium P/E and P/S multiples—I think it could hit a $200 billion valuation within six months of going public. The risk appetite is there to create the same tightly-held cult stock dynamics of PLTR. I think investors will feel the need to just own this company for life at any price and then close their eyes. If Anduril can entrench themselves in defense and are able to expand into the private commercial market (industrial and civilian security uses), long-term I think the big 1T is possible.

We’ve answered why tech, why private, and why space/defense. Here’s the last thing I’ll address for Part I.

Why do *I* want to be a private investor?

Long ago, SPV investing was just a sidequest and the main journey was still daytrading. Now it’s the other way around.

Even more reasons why I decided to concentrate on private investing:

I can leverage my past experiences in trading IPOs to give me an edge on exits—especially navigating that first 6-month lockup window where hype can juice returns.
I like learning about business fundamentals. A lot of these companies might not IPO quickly and thus in order to not hold the bag if plans go awry, I have to know what I actually own. This means studying their product, their execution, and their moat. I have to learn about valuation again, I like using this thing.
I genuinely enjoy researching how things work. This is curiosity-driven, not forced. One Youtube channel I’ve been into lately: Caleb Writes Code.
I like talking to people who’ve actually built and exited companies or who have spent a long time in the private deal space.
I enjoy looking at weird deals—even the ones I pass on, like real estate on the moon or cloning bats DNA. VC can be quite a zany marketplace!
Staying private helps my psychology. The less I can pay attention to daily mark-to-market fluctations, the less likely I am to sabotage myself with a brief moment of panic. Illiquidity isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
It’s a new challenge. I want to see if I can cross the final frontier and build a successful track record as a private investor. Poker player turned trader turned long-term investor sounds kinda cool.
It’s a slower game. I don’t want to keep staring at order flow for the rest of my life. I don’t want my finger hovering tightly over the buy/sell button anymore. I want to meditate and think on my decisions, and then commit to them.
Remember earlier when I said I have to invest before it’s too late? Well, our world might be fundamentally different in 5, 10, or 20 years. I’m hedging against the scenario where the robots win much faster than we think. I am aligning myself with the tech oligarchy, in case society fulfils the dark possibility that a dozen $10T+ tech companies will de-facto control the U.S. by 2040 and create a permanent underclass. Think about humanoids taking over the labor force. Think about LLM’s making coding obsolete. Think about SkyNet governing all of our personal lives from their space base on Mars, controlling an army of drones. If this happens, I don’t know if it will be great for society but at least I’ll be rich.

Anyway, we can stop there. As a reminder, this is my journey and you shouldn’t try to copy me. Please read the disclaimer in the footnote²³.

Next up in Part II: AI, Robotics, and frontier technologies.

Adventures in Private Investing, Pt I–Space and Defense

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