Jeff Stewart backed one of my companies about a decade ago, so it was great to have him on this week to share what he’s been building toward ever since. He’s the founder of GPO Fund, a growth-stage venture firm launched in 2018 with a specific mandate: back growth stage founders who want to expand through going public on one of the top twenty global exchanges. He’s been making this case since before it was fashionable, and he just published Global IPO: The Great Rewiring of Capital Markets, documenting the playbook.
The ‘Raspberry Pi’ Effect Of Going Public
GPO Fund’s origin story is personal. Jeff’s first company merged and moved into the public market. His next one stayed private. What he observed from the inside was that staying private “created a brittle capital structure.” That experience became the thesis.
The broader VC industry, he argues, is structurally incentivized to keep companies private, and that’s how the model works. GPO Fund is built to do the opposite: invest, help companies move into the public market, and use that listing as a tool to accelerate growth. Think Oracle or Intuit: companies that went public before they were unicorns, then used the credibility, liquidity, and talent access that comes with a listing to grow faster. As Jeff told us:
“You shouldn’t think of it as a financing event. You should think of it as a strategic financing event as part of a strategy of growing the company because, quite frankly, revenue trumps investment any day of the week.”
Raspberry Pi is Jeff’s go-to case study. They went public at sub-$2 billion on the London Stock Exchange, well before unicorn status. Once listed, a new set of enterprise customers started showing up who hadn’t known about their products, had assumed the company was a toy maker, and changed their perception entirely once Raspberry Pi had the profile of a public company. Revenue accelerated and new partnerships followed. Jeff also gave the example of Life360, which listed in Australia and is now a multi-billion dollar company.
He also made a point of saying that the goal in all of this isn’t to leave the US market behind. It’s to build relationships with global public market investors before you list, so listing day isn’t a cold start.
What Writing the Book Surfaced
Writing the book surfaced two things Jeff hadn’t fully appreciated going in.
The first is the scale of global retail investor participation. Super apps have brought hundreds of millions of new investors online worldwide, each trading, chatting, and analyzing companies across borders. Jeff hadn’t anticipated what investor Howard Lindzon calls the “degenerate economy,” where retail investors globally are not just buying but generating content, tokenizing equity, and borrowing against holdings. You don’t need to be a hundred-billion-dollar company to get meaningful global attention anymore.
The second was AI’s effect on the listing process itself:
“The filing and paperwork, and ongoing disclosure is getting massively easier, thanks to AI.”
That compression in cost and complexity is quietly lowering one of the main friction points for earlier-stage companies. New exchanges are coming online, like the Texas Stock Exchange (currently seeking regulatory approval), and established markets are being forced to simplify and compete. Geopolitics is accelerating the same dynamic. Asset confiscation risk and questions about custodianship are pushing large investors to rethink how and where they trade. Jeff sees all of it as pressure building toward a more distributed listing environment.
The conventional VC wisdom is to stay private as long as possible, maximize private round valuations, and treat the IPO as an endpoint. Jeff’s argument is that this calculus is increasingly wrong, and founders who treat going public as a deliberate growth lever, timed to fit a global investor base, may have a structural advantage over those who don’t. If that resonates, the book is the place to go deep on it. You can pick it up here, and watch the full interview above.
