AJ Scaramucci's collectibles company paid $2 million for a first-appearance Iron Man comic and also bought a record-setting Pokémon card. Ask him about either purchase, however, and the conversation tends to circle back to a problem familiar to anyone in the startup world: it can take a very long time for a young company to go public.

Scaramucci, the son of SkyBridge Capital founder Anthony Scaramucci, wants to give ordinary investors a shot at markets they have long been locked out of—art, dinosaur bones, trading cards, and other expensive collectibles. He ties that ambition to what he sees as a related flaw in early value creation: much of it remains locked away inside venture and growth-equity portfolios rather than reaching public markets.

That argument anchored an exclusive interview Fortune business editor Nick Lichtenberg conducted with Scaramucci for a story published a day earlier.

Scaramucci's venture firm, Solari Capital, emerged from stealth on Thursday with $350 million deployed since its founding across early-stage deals, late-stage growth investments, and companies it incubates in-house. Its backers include SV Angel founder Ron Conway, Breyer Capital's Jim Breyer, Bain Capital co-chairman Stephen Pagliuca, former Alphabet chief executive Eric Schmidt, and entrepreneur and author Peter Diamandis.

The firm's central idea is what Scaramucci calls "programmable reality"—the thesis that compounding computing power will make biology, intelligence, physical matter, and money engineerable the way software is. His portfolio serves as a showcase for the concept, with positions in xAI (now inside SpaceX), Suno, Tessera Therapeutics, Varda Space, Northwood Space—a lineup spanning artificial intelligence, biotech, and space.

Yet the narrower part of the pitch is the one that lingers. Companies used to reach an initial public offering in about four years, Scaramucci said in the interview; today the process takes 12 to 15.

The data supports his claim. Jay Ritter, a University of Florida professor known as "Mr. IPO," has found that the median venture-backed tech company was six to nine years old when it went public for most of the 1990s. (The median fell to four in 1999, during the dot-com bubble.) In 2024, the median age at listing was 13.5 years, and it was 12 last year.

Fewer companies are going public as well. Ritter's figures show 34 tech listings in 2025, compared with 205 in 1995. The deals are also far larger: last year's median venture-backed tech IPO carried roughly $132 million in revenue, versus about $40 million in 1995, with both figures adjusted for inflation. A growing share of company growth, in short, now happens before public investors ever get the chance to buy in.

Viewed through that lens, Solari's portfolio reads as a deliberate attempt to shorten the wait and open the doors. Fission Labs tokenizes shares of private companies—recording ownership as digital tokens that can change hands—so they can trade on a secondary market. Architect Financial is a derivatives exchange built for the AI economy. Radial Health, Solari's flagship incubation, appears on the Nasdaq Private Market, a venue where shares of still-private companies trade, as a pre-IPO name.

The lockout Scaramucci describes has long had a regulatory dimension: stakes in private companies have traditionally been limited to institutional and accredited investors, leaving most retail buyers to wait for a listing to gain exposure. Venture investors across the industry are also waiting years longer to get liquidity and their money back. Tokenized private shares and holy-grail collectibles are both ways to give more people access to assets the wealthy already own. What remains unclear is how easily those assets can be sold and priced—or what the going rate for dinosaur-bone shares might be. Those liquidity and pricing mechanics are what to watch as efforts to open private markets to wider audiences unfold.

This story was reported by Amanda Gerut for Fortune's Term Sheet newsletter and was originally featured on Fortune.com.