In
the summer of 2020, former Morgan Stanley trader Adam Crawley was wandering through Indonesia, Thailand and Australia, perfecting his qigong with a man called Master YanG, when a cold message on LinkedIn jerked him back to reality.
The sender was Noel Moldvai, a crypto enthusiast with a fondness for early-2000s Canadian rock and a pitch about the hottest corner of the private markets.
Crawley had no intention of going back into finance, but Moldvai sold him on a market in which access was scarce and demand was feral: pre-IPO shares in the largest and hottest startups on the planet. The ones planning trillion-dollar public offerings: Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI. The kinds of shares almost no retail investor is supposed to be able to buy. The kind everyone wants.
Bubble Broker: Augment president Adam Crawley says people want pre-IPO company shares so badly that they’ve been lending his firm money to seek out shares on their behalf.
