On a recent Animal Spirits Talk Your Book segment titled “Why Aren’t There More IPOs?”, host Michael Batnick offered a data point that captures the strangeness of private markets right now. Batnick said there are roughly 1,000 unicorn companies in existence, yet only 6 of them have raised a down round over the past 12 months, according to Batnick. Two numbers, no derived percentage necessary. The gap is the story.
Batnick and co-host Ben Carlson were in conversation with Christian Manafa, introduced on the episode as head of private growth strategies at VanEck. The three used that contrast as the entry point for a broader question about why IPO activity has been so muted. Their inference on the Animal Spirits Podcast, and it is an inference rather than an established fact, is that a large share of private valuations set during the exuberance of 2021 and 2022 have simply never been formally marked down. The absence of a down round leaves the paper price untested, even if it does not prove the mark is wrong.
Why Companies Are Staying Private
The podcast’s framing is that weak IPO activity ties directly to this dynamic. Going public forces a company to accept whatever price the public market is willing to pay on day one. For a company sitting on a 2021 mark that no recent round has validated, that repricing is a risk many boards and existing investors would rather defer, according to Animal Spirits Podcast. Staying private preserves the last known valuation on the cap table, even if that valuation would not clear in an open auction today.
Manafa argued that the current environment does not look like 2021 in one important respect, according to Animal Spirits Podcast. Back then, he said, valuations ran up broadly across the entire venture landscape. Today, in Manafa’s words, “more and more of it is being driven by fewer and fewer companies”. The capital, the attention, and the revenue growth are concentrating in a narrower group of names.
Compression in How Fast Companies Scale
Manafa also described a striking compression in the timelines that separate startup from scale. He said some companies are now reaching He said some companies are now reaching $100 million in revenue00 million in revenue in “12 to 18 months”, against what Manafa cited as a historical norm of 8 to 10 years. At the extreme end, Manafa said some companies are now reaching a billion in revenue “inside of a couple of years”.
That compression cuts two ways in the discussion. It helps explain how a small cohort of private companies can command extraordinary marks that look defensible on the growth curve. It also raises the stakes for everyone else, because the narrative energy and the pricing power sit with a small group while the broader base of unicorns waits for a fresh round to confirm or revise its last valuation.
Manafa’s Practical Warning
Manafa’s takeaway for anyone holding private exposure was direct. In his view, if a private position has not seen a fresh funding round in a while, it likely warrants a valuation haircut in an investor’s own mental accounting. He framed this as a working assumption for portfolio-level thinking rather than a judgment about any specific company.
A Slow Leak in Private Marks
Batnick’s closing image is the one that lingers. He described the eventual correction in private marks as “a flat tire that catches up with you 5 miles down the road” rather than a sudden crash, according to Animal Spirits Podcast. A slow leak that keeps the car moving for a stretch. The car keeps moving for a while. Then the handling changes.
For public-market investors watching the IPO calendar, that image is worth sitting with. The reason so few companies are stepping through the S-1 process may have less to do with market conditions on any given morning and more to do with what a fair re-mark would reveal on the way in. The podcast’s premise is that until private valuations catch up with what public buyers are willing to pay, the flow of large IPOs is likely to stay constrained. What that repricing eventually looks like, and when, the speakers did not attempt to forecast.