Two days ago, Bending Spoons acquired Airtable for $1.25B (2.7x revenue). For context, in 2021 Airtable raised an ~$11.7B round. What happened? (And what does it indicate for secondaries and private capital?)

Hari Raghavan wrote an incredible post on the decline of Airtable and the road not taken in terms of their failed AI transformation (link in the comments). Broadly, Airtable’s product was built for a different era (where UI had to compensate for people who were not used to working in code). In recent years, Airtable grafted AI agents on top, but fundamentally they were wiped out by AI-native workflows.

However, here’s what I find fascinating: having spent close to a decade in secondaries, I’ve seen Airtable deflate steadily across a bunch of small (and large) transactions since 2021. In late 2023, one sizeable secondary valued Airtable at $4B. Since then, based on my analysis of on-platform and off-platform transactions, I saw their share price drop around 60%. (Which is pretty close to their eventual acquisition price of $1.25B.)

In other words, Airtable is a private company. But if you were watching Airtable and wanted to trade on your conviction in private capital markets, you could have. And realized a potentially less impactful outcome than a $1.25B acquisition.

This was profoundly not possible 5 years ago. Now? It is.

This raises a broader point around how secondaries and increasingly, larger syndicated primaries are making private markets behave like public ones. Public markets are made efficient by individuals and institutions placing hundreds of trades. This is percolating into private markets for single equities.

As market liquidity and depth grow around us in real time, venture investing can be actively managed, not quite like a public asset portfolio, but getting closer all the time. As more crowds gather into private capital, the wisdom of crowds is coming through ever-stronger.