The major issue has always been
Arjun Sethi, co-founder of Tribe Capital, on investor allocation strategies and democratizing access to capital
The winning private market product is the one that helps companies stay in control while still giving shareholders real liquidity. In practice, issuer centric means the company decides who can buy, who can sell, how much can trade, and when, instead of letting brokers or outside investors set the process. That matters because private stock is not just an asset, it is part of the company’s hiring plan, cap table design, and fundraising strategy. The Facebook and early SecondMarket era showed what happens when buyers drive the market, prices jump around, unknown investors appear, and issuers respond by shutting the whole market down.
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Issuer centric does not mean anti buyer. It means the company is the market maker of its own stock. SecondMarket eventually pivoted from open trading to company run liquidity programs, and Nasdaq Private Market scaled by helping issuers run controlled tenders and repurchases rather than open exchange style trading.
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The reason buyers dislike this model is simple, they lose pricing power and access advantage. Closed tenders are often priced at or below the last round, and employees still sell less and later than founders and investors, so buy side firms benefit when liquidity stays episodic and company controlled.
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The deeper logic is that private stock transfers are three party deals, buyer, seller, and issuer. If the issuer is ignored, companies tighten transfer rules, shareholders go to forwards and side deals, and the market gets more fragmented. The more trusted and issuer aligned the platform, the more secondaries can happen at all.
Over time, private liquidity is moving toward recurring, company managed programs with better disclosure and more controlled price discovery. That shifts secondaries from a gray market into a corporate finance tool. The platforms that win will be the ones that make liquidity feel like part of compensation and cap table management, not a fight between opportunistic buyers and reluctant issuers.