Logan Bartlett: Private markets feel like 2021 again, VC capital concentration accelerating, IPO window uncertain

Summary

Logan Bartlett, managing director at Redpoint Ventures, gives a blunt read on where private and public markets stand in March 2025: the public side is riddled with uncertainty, and private markets feel uncomfortably like 2021 again.

Public markets: priced for fog

Bartlett is not optimistic on public equities. He cites a Morgan Stanley equity research contact who described sentiment coming out of a recent institutional conference as the most negative in a decade, with the exception of the onset of Covid. The culprit is uncertainty rather than any specific fundamental deterioration — but Bartlett notes that even if software companies aren't directly exposed to tariff or macro disruption, their end customers are, and that flows through.

On whether DOGE-style efficiency is working its way into corporate behavior more broadly, Bartlett thinks it's already happened over the past 18 months. Public software companies have consciously traded growth for free cash flow, pulling headcount and hiring freeze levers that private equity operators like Vista and Thoma Bravo have used for years. AI, he argues, will only accelerate that trend. Nobody is cutting to the bone the way Twitter did, but the mindset has shifted.

Private markets: 2021 vibes

In private markets, capital has concentrated rather than contracted. Sophisticated endowments and pension plans have quietly stepped back from multi-billion-dollar mega-funds, but sovereign wealth and Middle Eastern capital has filled the gap — writing $200–500M checks into the same brand-name funds without blinking. The result is that top-tier firms got a mulligan on 2020 and 2021 excesses, LPs were largely forgiving, and deployment rates have climbed back toward cycle highs.

Bartlett frames it as a prisoners' dilemma: everyone knows 2001 was a great vintage for those who leaned in while others pulled back, but because every sophisticated LP has studied that history, nobody pulls back, prices stay elevated, and the lesson never quite teaches itself.

IPO window: push through it

On Coreweave specifically, Bartlett's unsolicited advice is to just go. Institutional managers want direct AI exposure, and Coreweave's anchor contracts with Nvidia, Microsoft, and OpenAI provide enough cash-flow certainty to underwrite the story. Waiting for a cleaner macro window risks those contract renewals coming into view before the company is public.

The Figure AI round — priced at roughly $40 billion — draws more skepticism. Bartlett flags a pattern common near cycle peaks: SPVs forming to let managers write checks larger than their funds can actually hold, which raises questions about who is setting the price and why. At $40B, he struggles to map a credible exit path for employees or investors, and contrasts it with a more defensible structure at something closer to $10B framed explicitly as a pre-IPO round.

More broadly, Bartlett thinks the window for large AI model companies to go public is open right now, and that OpenAI in particular could float a small percentage, capture enormous retail and institutional demand, and use the proceeds to fund capex — potentially trading at a premium comparable to Palantir's current multiples.

VC industry structure: the carry question

On VC firms going public, Bartlett is intellectually interested but structurally skeptical. The core problem is that venture, unlike private equity, is still a talent-retention business. A Blackstone MD cannot easily defect and replicate the firm's institutional infrastructure, debt relationships, and deal flow. A strong venture investor can raise $300–400M and compete the next week. Shifting to a bonus-and-RSU structure only works when people can't walk out the door — and in venture, they can.

The Information's reporting that General Catalyst has moved toward bonuses over carry, alongside some partner departures, is the live case study. Bartlett doesn't dismiss the experiment but says retaining quality investors under that model is the unresolved question.

A related pattern he has noticed lately: funds with capital to deploy are sending junior or secondary partners to lead rounds at inflated prices to get the asset. Solo capitalists writing outsized checks are less common now than in 2021; the bigger distortion is established funds overpaying through their second or third-string team rather than a named principal.

AI as sustaining vs. disruptive innovation

Bartlett's view, consistent with a position he held two years ago, is that most AI equity value will accumulate to incumbents — Microsoft, Google, Meta, and OpenAI — the way Apple and Google captured the lion's share of mobile value through the App Store and the handset itself. But he still expects hundreds of billions in net-new equity value to form in derivative companies, the way Uber and WhatsApp were genuinely new businesses that mobile made possible.

His analogy for Google: the company has every structural advantage — distribution, YouTube content, talent, capital — and will eventually figure out AI, the way the U.S. eventually entered World War II. Whether it does so fast enough is the open question.

Apple: deterministic culture, probabilistic problem

On Apple Intelligence, Bartlett is candid. His clearest framing is that Apple is a deterministic culture trying to execute on a probabilistic problem, and those are directly at odds. AI requires fast iteration, public feedback loops, and tolerance for visible failure. Apple measures 35 times, cuts once, keeps everything insular, and controls the ecosystem. That's a structural mismatch, not just a product stumble.

He thinks Apple will probably continue to fumble AI — but is genuinely uncertain whether it matters for the business. At a $3.2 trillion market cap with lock-in across its hardware and software ecosystem, execution failures in AI may not translate into meaningful share loss. The more actionable path, in his view, is aggressive M&A: Apple has returned over a trillion dollars of cash over 14 years and could simply acquire whatever breakout consumer AI product fits the ecosystem, rather than trying to build it internally.

Ramp

Bartlett invested in Ramp at a $1 billion valuation, again at $3.5 billion, and again at roughly $8 billion — the last of those in December 2021, which closed in early 2022, making it, as he puts it, the last boat off the island before the zero-rate era ended. He held conviction through the downturn, telling his team internally for three years that he couldn't see the ceiling on the business. The recent fundraise at a significantly higher valuation was the first public signal that the earlier round's price had been crossed. His broader takeaway from the experience is that excessive focus on entry price usually signals doubt about the ultimate outcome — when the conviction is real, the price differential within a reasonable range matters far less than just getting into business with the right team.