Smart Humans with Slava Rubin · Oct 21, 2026 · 44m · 36m saved
With Michael Goodbody, CEO of Get Access
Ten years ago there were about 80 private unicorns, worth roughly $300 billion combined. Today there are around 1,500, worth about $5.5 trillion, and the companies that matter most, from Anthropic and OpenAI to SpaceX, have grown up almost entirely before going public.
Michael Goodbody, CEO of Get Access, told Slava Rubin on Smart Humans that ordinary public-market investors now miss most of that growth. His answer is a membership club for private deals rather than another fund of funds.
"Every single transformational technology that has come to fruition in the last five years, they've all come to maturity in private markets before they go public in a way that just simply hasn't happened before."
Michael spent roughly a decade running marketing at TransferWise (now Wise), Credit Karma, Dave and Robinhood, where he was Global Head of Marketing, before joining Get Access as CEO in January.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 44 minutes of audio, 8 minutes of reading.
Here are the 8 insights that matter.
Key Takeaways
The biggest gains now happen before the IPO, Michael argues, not after it
Amazon is "six to seven thousand X" its IPO price, a scale he says public investors rarely get now
Get Access charges a $5,000 annual membership and 10% carry, with no management or setup fees
Every deal is direct on the company's cap table at the lead investor's price, with no secondaries and no leverage
Michael says Get Access makes money by keeping members, not by gathering assets
His macro calls: no recession in the next 12 months, slightly higher rates and stocks up
He expects OpenAI to go public within a year, depending on what Anthropic does
His three-year picks are Wealthfront in public markets and Crusoe in private markets
1. From Wise to Robinhood
Michael calls himself new to private-markets investing but not to fintech. At TransferWise he watched the company grow from an $840 million valuation, a16z's first investment in the UK and Europe, to the roughly $12 billion public company it is today. He then worked at Credit Karma and Dave, and was Global Head of Marketing at Robinhood from late 2022 until last year.
Michael Goodbody says new technology now matures in private hands
"Every single transformational technology that has come to fruition in the last five years, they've all come to maturity in private markets before they go public in a way that just simply hasn't happened before." — Michael Goodbody
Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX and, earlier, ByteDance's TikTok all grew up almost entirely as private companies. At Robinhood, Michael worked on giving the platform's investors some way into that earlier-stage growth, and that work seeded the idea for Get Access.
