📶 General Catalyst eyes an IPO

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Good morning 👋

And welcome to the first Monday of March. Months and days blend now.

General Catalyst is rumored to be thinking about going public. It’s a bold move if they go through with it, and it could have ripple effects for the rest of the venture world.

We give our two cents in today’s piece.

General Catalyst (GC) is rumored to be considering going public.

Let’s rewind: 25 years ago, GC launched in quaint Cambridge, Mass., with $73 million in commitments. A decade later, they opened an office in Palo Alto to chase all of the Internet 2.0 companies.

That bet paid off (big).

Today, GC’s a behemoth.

GC has ballooned up to 20 managing directors, $30 billion in assets, and offices from San Francisco to Bengaluru. They’ve outgrown the VC sandbox, too.

The firm has been on the cutting edge of evolving their offering, and now they offer financing products, a wealth management arm, and a healthcare system grab in Ohio. Plus, they made two smaller VC firm acquisitions over the past few years.

Going public would be the next phase of their evolution.

Why it matters: We have precedent of private equity firms going public (Apollo, Blackstone, KKR, others), I was curious what Grok thinks about the pros and cons of a firm like GC going public.

Here’s what it had to say:

As AUM swells (Blackstone’s at $1 trillion, Apollo’s pushing $700 billion, GC’s at $30 billion), finding enough deep-pocketed LPs gets tricky.

Going public taps a broader pool—retail investors, institutions, you name it. It’s less about “exhausting” LPs and more about diversifying capital sources beyond the usual suspects.

Plus, it hands LPs and founders a faster exit ramp. No more waiting out decade-long fund cycles—sell the stock, cash out, done.

Public stock is like Monopoly money for deal junkies. Apollo and Blackstone have used their tickers (APO, BX) to snap up assets and rivals—think Apollo’s 2021 Athene merger or Blackstone’s real estate spree.

For GC, eyeing healthcare systems and smaller VCs, a public listing could fuel that hybrid-model hunger. Stock swaps beat begging LPs for more dry powder every time.

It’s a growth hack: scale faster, diversify harder, all without draining the cash pile. Wall Street’s a buffet if you’ve got the shares.

Going public slaps a shiny market valuation on these firms—Blackstone’s worth $175 billion, Apollo’s at $85 billion today. GC could join that club, dwarfing private estimates.

It’s a flex for talent, clients, and competitors. A public ticker screams “we’re here to stay,” not just a partnership fading with its founders.

Plus, transparency (well, kinda) lures bigger fish—pensions, sovereign funds—who crave the data. For your investor crowd, it’s a signal: these aren’t just funds, they’re empires.

What happens next: Up until this point, these are all just rumors, so we can’t make anything of it (yet).

But it’s fun to play the “what if” game and think through scenarios like this.

Public scrutiny means quarterly earnings pressure, which is tough when your gains are tied up in illiquid valuations and / or buyouts.

If GC does plan to go public, we’ll be sure that you’re one of the first to know about it.

We don’t like conferences, so we created our own version that we would actually look forward to going to.

📆 Dates: April 24-27, 2025

📍 Location: Miami, FL

ℹ️ Other details:

We’ve already confirmed half of the guests, we only have space for a few more, and applications close in under a month.

If you’re interested, we’d recommend letting us know sooner rather than later …

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Thanks for reading this far and giving us a little bit of your attention this week.

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- Clay
(Founder @ Confluence.VC | GP @ Outlaw)