The customers for this from the GS side are what are referred to as high net worth individuals and family trusts. They aren't your friend across the street taking out a second mortgage on his home so he can play the private markets. There is an assumption that you're an accredited investor, and while I don't know the GS requirements for getting in on deals like this, I can only imagine it's far in excess of the accreditation requirements (which is relatively straightforward to achieve -- $1M in liquid assets or 2 years of income over $200K / $300K if filing jointly).

There may be some reason to be concerned otherwise -- pensions and endowments are often customers for this sort of thing -- but they have risk managers that hopefully know what they're doing. Which may not give you warm fuzzies, given recent history, but in general these are not the people losing their shirts and affecting the economy as a whole.

Almost! People are worried about another tech bubble bursting because of things like overvaluation of companies and the frequency of unicorns (private companies valued over $1bn) appearing on the scene (which gives perhaps an illusion that VCs are funding left, right and center).

But you could say that the huge growth we're seeing in investment in tech now is different to 15 years ago because:

- most VCs are funding significant amounts of their capital in later-stage startups and companies that have shown a lot of promise ("private IPOs"), rather than the other way around

- there are more startups now than 15 years ago but the same (or lower) amount of total capital invested, whereas before a smaller number of startups were funded from a huge pot

- generally tech companies nowadays, even those unicorns a few years old, have solid financials and managed to turn a profit. This wasn't entirely the case 15 years ago.

There was a Andreessen Horowitz presentation on this very topic going around a few weeks back - it's worth a read if I can dig it up (or you could be relentlessly resourceful ;)).

You do realize that one of the classic signs of a bubble is people explaining "...this time it's different".

Haha. It's difficult to say for sure but those are just the main contrast points. Things could very well turn out badly.