The confusing market

It was the first official summer weekend in New York with temperatures hitting 80 this weekend. I took full advantage and enjoyed life meeting with an old friend all afternoon Saturday, and then hanging out with a friend at the pool on Sunday.

It was the weekend I needed after a long couple of weeks. I haven’t been very social in the last few months with the demands of the job and life as a parent. I’ve focused a lot of my time into rest and being a good parent, and with summer finally here, I think it’s time to relax a bit and have some fun.

Prior to leaving on Friday, I got out our state of the private markets newsletter. And on Saturday, I had some good chats with some of my friends also in the industry. The vibes are definitely a bit… well weird and confusing.

One of my friends who has historically been in software PE has mentioned that things are just depressing at his old firm. They’re holding a ton of SaaS companies still and they’re all coming to terms that things are likely not going to end up at how they thought when they invested. The gist is that it may be 3+ years until they can sell some of these companies.

On the other front, AI is front and center and it’s hard to ignore Anthropic and OpenAI both looking to go public at $1T+ in the coming year. Even in the earlier stage AI world, it’s tough to see how this will all shake out.

Many of us have been at conferences the last few weeks and the consensus from all of us is that it seems like everyone is doing the same thing. AI CRMs, AI agent operating systems, etc. but it’s hard to see any differentiation at this point among the early players.

Of course things will change and the market will settle down over time. The first domino is of course the looming SpaceX IPO. I’m cautiously optimistic as we head into a monster June.