Don’t Wait for the IPO — Find the Next AI Winner Now
The biggest AI fortunes may be made before a company ever goes public.
Listen to the audio version of this article (generated by AI).
Editor’s Note: Most people think the biggest fortunes in technology are made after a company goes public. My InvestorPlace colleague Luke Lango believes that assumption is becoming increasingly outdated.
In today’s guest essay, he looks back at some of Silicon Valley’s most successful early investments – from Fairchild Semiconductor to Google to Anthropic – to explain why the biggest opportunities often appear long before Wall Street takes notice.
Then he’ll share the framework he’s using to identify the next wave of AI opportunities during a free online event on Thursday, July 30, at 1 p.m. Eastern. Reserve your seat here.
Back in 1957, eight young engineers working under William Shockley found the co-inventor of the transistor impossible to work for. So, they left the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California, and never looked back.
The eight quickly figured out that no institution or company would support them. Back then, the suburbs and farmland south of San Francisco and north of San Jose wasn’t exactly “Silicon Valley” yet. The budding tech firms in the region weren’t quite ready to invest in unproven ideas.
They were just frustrated engineers with no product and no revenues.
So they called a young financier named Arthur Rock.
Rock did not have the capital himself, but he had a willingness to bet on people he deemed impressive.
He found a camera company willing to gamble $1.5 million on eight founders and an idea.
Thus, Fairchild Semiconductor was born. Fairchild eventually became one of the most influential technology companies in history, spawning Intel Corp. (INTC) and dozens of other semiconductor firms worth trillions of dollars today.
And the men Shockley lost became known affectionately as the “Traitorous Eight.” They were the accidental architects of a model Silicon Valley still runs on to this day.
The Traitorous Eight: That’s Gordon Moore – of “Moore’s law” fame – on the far left.
Credit: Intel
That same instinct resurfaced in 1998 when Andy Bechtolsheim sat down with two Stanford University grad students. Right on the spot, before their company had a business model or recognizable brand, the Sun Microsystems co-founder wrote a $100,000 check to Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Anyone who’s ever Googled… well… anything knows how that story ended. But for the record: That $100,000 check reportedly bought roughly a 1% stake in Google, a position that eventually became worth tens of billions of dollars.
More recently, in 2023 Spark Capital invested $75 million in Anthropic while it was still an obscure AI startup with little revenue. Today, millions of people are on a first-name basis with Claude, and that stake is estimated to be worth roughly $7 billion.
Across nearly 70 years, the technologies and the players keep changing. The playbook doesn’t.
Rock backed eight unknown engineers. Bechtolsheim backed two graduate students. Spark Capital backed an AI startup few people had heard of.
In each case, the biggest opportunity wasn’t buying a great business after everyone recognized it. It was recognizing exceptional founders and businesses before everyone else did.
I think that same playbook matters more today than it has in decades.
First, because AI has created an unprecedented race to develop new technologies. Second, because the companies leading that race increasingly have more money than time. And finally, because that combination is changing where some of the biggest fortunes in technology are being created.
Let me explain…
Why the Giants Now Buy Instead of Build
There’s a reason this playbook has endured for nearly 70 years, and it isn’t just today’s excitement over AI.
When the prize is building the next great computing platform, speed becomes everything. If a startup has already solved a problem that would take your own engineers two years to crack, buying that company is often far cheaper than losing those two years.
That’s exactly what’s happening in today’s AI race.
Alphabet Inc. (GOOG) made that decision early, back in 2014, when it acquired the British AI startup DeepMind. Rather than spending years assembling a comparable research lab from scratch, Google bought one of the world’s best AI teams outright. More than a decade later, DeepMind sits at the heart of Google’s AI strategy.
Meta Platforms Inc. (META) reached a similar conclusion last year when it invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI. The deal wasn’t just about software. Scale AI had become one of the industry’s leading providers of the high-quality training data and infrastructure needed to build advanced AI models. Instead of trying to re-create that expertise internally, Meta bought a seat at the table.
Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) made perhaps the biggest AI boom bet of all. Its $23 billion worth of investments in OpenAI, made between 2019 and 2023, gave the company immediate access to one of the world’s leading AI developers years before it could have built a comparable capability on its own.
And this isn’t unique to AI. Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) spent much of the 1990s building its networking empire by buying promising startups rather than reinventing technologies itself.
Long story short, this isn’t a new playbook. It’s an old one that’s becoming even more valuable.
Every one of those deals happened because the real value had already been created inside a startup, long before Wall Street ever started paying attention.
That’s why I think one of the most important shifts in investing today is this:
The buyout, not the IPO, is increasingly becoming the finish line many early investors are aiming for.
The Playbook Hasn’t Changed
Even the best startup investors get it wrong sometimes. And nobody understands that better than the funders themselves.
Bessemer Venture Partners keeps what it calls its “Anti-Portfolio” – a public list of companies it had the opportunity to back but passed on. Google is on it. So are Apple, eBay, Airbnb, FedEx, and dozens of other companies that went on to become enormous successes.
Being early is no guarantee, but it does give you the opportunity to make a decision before the rest of the market has reached the same conclusion.
That’s the common thread running through Fairchild Semiconductor, Google, Anthropic, and countless other success stories. The biggest fortunes come from someone recognizing extraordinary people and extraordinary businesses before the consensus formed.
That’s the playbook. And I believe it’s becoming more relevant again as AI reshapes the technology landscape.
The challenge, of course, is knowing what characteristics to look for when opportunities do appear.
That’s exactly what I want to show you during my free 2026 AI MegaDeal Event on Thursday, July 30, at 1 p.m. Eastern.
I’ll explain why I believe AI is creating a new generation of acquisition opportunities, walk through the framework I use to identify them, and share the one company I believe best represents this shift today.
That event is free to attend, but you must reserve your seat in order to get an invitation.
If the history of Arthur Rock, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Spark Capital teaches us anything, it’s that the biggest investment opportunities often look the least obvious at the beginning.
My goal is to help you put this playbook to work before the rest of Wall Street catches on.
Sincerely,
Luke Lango
Senior Investment Analyst, InvestorPlace
P.S. When you reserve your seat for the 2026 AI MegaDeal Event, you’ll also have the opportunity to join my VIP text list. As a thank-you, I’ll send you my new report, The AI Collectors’ Portfolio: 7 Stocks to Buy for the Biggest Tech Spending Boom of All Time. It’s free, but you need to register for the event first.
