Your Daily Gist — March 21, 2026

Hi Quay, welcome to Daily Gist — your newsletters, distilled into conversation! We’re diving into a venture landscape where defense tech startups are soaring 500% on their first day of trading, even as the mid-market acquisition engine hits a ten-year low. Five hundred and twenty percent on a first-day pop sounds less like a strategic investment and more like a fever dream for a market that has been starving for a win. If the IPO window was supposed to crack open slow