Every man a VC: On public deep-tech startups
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Every man a VC: On public deep-tech startups
michael blog<br>Jul 10, 2026
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US Senator and populist Huey Long, whose slogan was ‘every man a king.’<br>The life of a venture capitalist is a hard one: the vast majority of their investments are doomed to fail, making them easy targets for criticism (you put how much money into Juicero?). And yet, a portfolio company will occasionally become a massive success, perhaps indicating a degree of foresight or talent on the investor’s part (assuaging their ego). The hits are big and the misses are obvious. This is all a by-product of the venture capital model (AKA the power law), which dictates that a small portion of a fund’s investments will drive total portfolio returns.<br>Put this way, venture investing doesn’t seem too far off from gambling – occasional dopamine creating events separated by long stretches of failure. That sounds like a pretty good gig to me! It’s like scratching lotto tickets with other people’s money. Certainly it’s more exciting than putting fractions of paychecks into an index fund for the next thirty-some odd years. The increasing prevalence of sports betting, prediction markets, and zero-day options trading suggests the average American shares my perspective.<br>However, most of us can’t behave like a VC, and not simply because of a lack of capital. Getting access to these early-stage investments has historically been restricted to VCs, their limited partners, and high-net-worth angel investors. Us common folk are legally barred from participating in such deals due to SEC regulations. While I think it my God-given right to lose my savings in a half-baked scam, the government disagrees. Moreover, the best deals are hard to get into; VCs often compete for allocation by offering additional value-adds besides pure capital.<br>Things are changing though. Take for example this year’s cohort of giant tech IPOs: it’s possible for retail investors to get economic exposure to Anthropic and OpenAI via special purpose vehicles, crypto-based perpetual futures, and plain old ownership of the already public tech companies which have stakes in the AI labs.1 SpaceX’s IPO performance was quite well-mirrored by these crypto instruments.2 Alternatively, us plebians can just buy normal stock once it’s available. These companies are after all deeply unprofitable and will ostensibly grow! That’s all well and good, but it’s still hard to paint a picture of 10- or 100x-ing your investment when you’re getting in at a $1-2 trillion valuation. If only I, a relatively cash-poor retail investor, could get in on high-risk companies before they reach valuations in the hundreds of billions.<br>Thankfully, a new class of investments is rising to fill this underserved need. I call them the ‘public deep-tech startups,’ and they are defined by a combination of enormous technical risk, voracious capital needs, and often, religious retail fervor. To the untrained eye, these firms look like they’d be best funded by some combination of federal dollars and venture capital, given their dual technical and commercial risks. To the sophisticate however, these companies are clear fits for public markets.<br>The prototypical example is IonQ, Inc. This is a $10-30 billion dollar public company that specializes in the development of trapped ion quantum computers. Quantum computing is a very confusing, famously opaque field, and I’m not going to explain it in detail now. For the purposes of this piece, please take these points as a given: 1) Neither IonQ nor any of its competitors have a scaled, functioning quantum computer today; 2) It will take many more billions of dollars of investment to build such a device, and there is no guarantee that any individual company’s technical approach will succeed; 3) useful commercial applications (and thus value) for this quantum computer are sparse and uncertain. If you’d like to learn more about these points, or about the quantum computing space in general – I’ve written a book about the topic that I plan to release soon. This piece is in fact covert advertising for said book; please comment enthusiastically if you are interested!<br>OK – given those postulates, I hope you can buy that IonQ is primarily a speculative investment. It entered the public markets during the SPAC3 boom of 2021, joined by its quantum computing peers Rigetti and D-Wave. The trio has bucked the traditional SPAC narrative (poor returns, varying degrees of fraud, etc.) and done fairly well over the past 5 years, buoyed by enormous retail interest in the sector, albeit marred by significant volatility. These companies have used their public status to their advantage: they’ve sold equity, sold warrants, and used their stock to conduct aggressive acquisition strategies.<br>And now a new wave of public deep-tech companies is emerging, perhaps influenced by the success of this vanguard. In the quantum space, we’ve seen...