Graded against every covered company that has since listed: the median fund mark was materially below the first traded price, and the two worst cases were not errors at all but share-count changes. Why that distinction matters more than the error.
Lesson 2 gave you a checkable private valuation. This lesson asks the follow-up that valuation providers rarely publish about themselves: when one of these companies finally listed, how close was the mark?
The only way to answer it is to wait for covered companies to go public and then compare. As of the latest build that has happened 6 times, at a median of 84 days between the last available mark and the first trade.
6 is a small sample and no amount of presentation changes that. It is, however, the whole population — every covered company that has listed, with none removed for being embarrassing. Read it as a range of outcomes, not as a prediction.
A mark is dollars per share of a named instrument. A first-day close is dollars per share of newly listed common stock. Those are the same unit only if the share count did not change in between — and going public frequently changes it. Preferred converts, classes collapse into one, and a company will often split or reverse-split so the offer price lands in a conventional range.
When that happens the difference between the mark and the close is mostly the share-count change, not a valuation error. 3 of the 6 listings are in that state. They are kept in the table — hiding them would be worse — but flagged, and excluded from the headline statistic.
This is the detail that lets people publish enormous numbers about private-market gains. Compare a pre-split per-share mark with a post-split price and you can manufacture almost any return you like. Always ask whether the share count is the same on both sides.
These are the 3 cases where the share count held and the subtraction is legitimate.
| Company | Mark | Offer | First close | Mark error | Day-1 pop |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
CRCL Circle Internet Group · 2025-06-05 | $29.05 | $31.00 | $83.23 | -65.1% | +168.5% |
RDDT Reddit · 2024-03-21 | $31.15 | $34.00 | $50.44 | -38.2% | +48.4% |
CART Instacart (Maplebear) · 2023-09-19 | $32.50 | $30.00 | $33.70 | -3.6% | +12.3% |
A negative mark error means the funds valued the company below where it first closed. 3 of the graded events were marked below, 0 above, and 1 landed within 25% either way.
| Company | Mark | First close | Day-1 pop | Why excluded |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SPCX | $2,120.00 | $160.95 | +19.2% | Share count changed before listing (≈10×) — per-share figures not comparable |
| FIG | $26.39 | $115.50 | +250.0% | Share count changed before listing — per-share figures not comparable |
| CRWV | $939.85 | $40.00 | 0.0% | Share count changed before listing — per-share figures not comparable |
The median absolute error across the comparable set is 38.2%; across all events, including the recapitalised ones, it is 71.1%. The difference between those two numbers is the entire argument for separating the two groups.
The temptation is to turn the median error into a correction factor — "funds run 38% low, so mark everything up". Do not. The sample is tiny, the sign is not guaranteed, and the mechanism producing it is partly about how first-day prices are set rather than about value.
Two defensible uses:
The full table, including latest closes so you can see how these listings held up after the first day, is on the accuracy page.
A fund marked a company at $8.50 per share. It later listed and closed its first day at $31.00 — but the company did a 4-for-1 stock split on the way to market. What is the honest conclusion about the mark?
Across the graded listings, the median mark came in materially BELOW the first closing price. What is the most defensible reading?
Why is a sample of a handful of graded listings still worth publishing?
Every graded listing with its mark, its filing date, its first close and its latest close — plus the ones we exclude and why.