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About the Author
Jeffrey Stewart offers a rare vantage point on IPOs. He’s a serial founder who built Inc. 500 companies, an investor who’s backed ambitious entrepreneurs, and a Fintech CEO who scaled across borders. After seeing the corrosive impact of companies staying private for too long, Jeffrey became obsessed with understanding the opportunity of multi-jurisdictional public offerings.
By 2018 he co-founded the GPO Fund, a growth stage venture capital firm, focusing on founder-lead, disruptive business that can benefit from accelerated international expansion and public market access.
Jeffrey made his first public market investment and started his first company before high school. He cut his teeth at Ernst & Young consulting for the Nasdaq regulatory group, the predecessor to FINRA, an experience that later proved invaluable as a Fintech founder who worked with regulators across two dozen countries.
As an adjunct professor at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), Jeffrey has lectured on the impact of technology on global capital markets and international policy affairs.
Having been on both sides of the table, raising capital as a founder and deploying it as an investor, Jeffrey understands what it takes to build great companies and back them at the right time. He believes passionately in the power of startups to drive innovation and create wealth, not just for founders but for investors who recognize their potential early.
Why This Story
Matters
We are on the cusp of a radical change in how venture-backed companies go public. Technologies such as AI, distributed ledger, mobile computing and cross-border telecommunications are combining with global demographic and geopolitical trends to restructure the public markets, ultimately leading to a new epoch of IPOs. We call it the "Global IPO.”
Entrepreneurs who recognize and adapt to these changes will build businesses with greater durability, impact and long-term value. Investors who can identify these opportunities early, before the market fully appreciates them, stand to benefit as these companies compound in value.
This book is about what’s next. Global IPOs are now within reach—faster, cheaper, less distracting, and available earlier in a company’s life. Thanks to interconnected markets, regulatory variety, and a surge in global wealth, going public isn’t the endgame anymore. It’s a launchpad. Companies can go public earlier, publicly list, and then grow into a decacorn, using the many benefits of being public to accelerate growth.
From Founders to Funders
My partners at GPO Fund and I didn’t set out to be VCs. We were founders first—hands dirty, sleeves rolled up. We built several venture-backed companies. We made some angel bets. We thrived, driven by the adrenaline of scaling at speed.
Then we saw the deadly pattern: staying private too long was killing value for too many companies, and their investors.
At the same time, we were building across borders. We saw up-close, the global surge of demand for high-quality investments. We saw hundreds of millions around the world joining the middle class. We saw wealth becoming distributed much more broadly. We also saw a swelling number of international institutions hungry for access to world-changing companies and technologies, not as venture insiders, but as public market investors.
Our most exciting insight: The world’s capital markets were being rewired. The IPO wasn’t dead, it was going global.
So we launched the GPO Fund. Not just to “invest,” but to fix a problem. To back the most ambitious founders. Leaders who wanted to take their companies public earlier in their lifecycle. Just like Oracle, Salesforce, and AOL did, long before “unicorn” became a buzzword.
Our mission: help companies use the credibility, visibility, and financial flexibility of being public to build generation-defining businesses.
