Information Scarcity Drives Private Secondaries
Dan Akivis, senior associate at Expansion VC, on selling secondary and managing LP relationships
The real bottleneck in private secondaries is not matching buyers and sellers, it is getting enough trustworthy information into the market for anyone to underwrite risk with conviction. In practice, buyers are often pricing off rumors, stale round marks, and partial access rather than current operating data, which is why discounts persist and why information rights matter less than they sound, if the company is not willing to share on an ongoing basis.
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Private shares usually trade with an illiquidity and information discount because the market is thin, company approved, and unevenly informed. A lead investor may set the headline round price, but secondary buyers still haircut that number because they lack routine disclosures and clean price history.
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Platforms solve execution more than education. They can aggregate buyers, paperwork, and smaller checks, but they do not automatically create the research layer that public markets have through filings, earnings calls, and analyst coverage. Without that layer, many names stay hard to move even when a marketplace exists.
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This is why issuer alignment is the center of the market. Once companies allow controlled tenders, recurring liquidity windows, or a trusted shareholder structure like an SPV or platform vehicle, they can give liquidity without blowing up the cap table. That shifts secondaries from gray market scavenging to a managed corporate finance tool.
The market is heading toward more company sanctioned, repeatable liquidity with standardized disclosures, fewer toll collecting intermediaries, and more trading through trusted wrappers rather than direct cap table transfers. As that happens, the winners will be the platforms and issuers that make private stock feel less like a rumor trade and more like an investable security.