Every successful, publicly-traded company started out in the private markets, where venture capitalists and other investors provide early-stage funding in exchange for a shot at incredible future returns.
You're likely already familiar with many of the success stories. Naspers' $32 million investment in 2001 in a little-known Chinese tech company called Tencent rose 60,000% in value over the next 17 years. And no, that's not a typo -- they recently sold 2% of their stake for a cool $10.6 billion. Twitter, Alphabet, and WhatsApp all took early stage capital and went on to provide huge future payouts for their VC partners.
