Two-lane future for secondaries
Arjun Sethi, co-founder of Tribe Capital, on investor allocation strategies and democratizing access to capital
The key implication is that late stage secondaries stop looking like venture and start looking like compressed upside with less room for error. Tribe targets 5x to 10x outcomes at entry, or at least 3x to 5x later on, so once a company reaches roughly $3B to $10B in value, the remaining path to those returns requires unusually fast growth from an already large base. That makes the underwriting math much tighter, even if the company is still strong.
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Tribe is not describing a hard cutoff by company quality. It is describing a return model cutoff. The firm says secondaries need to fit the same return framework as primaries, which is why it prefers cases where it already has deep company data or an existing relationship rather than buying on market chatter alone.
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This is why the most active secondary market often concentrates in famous late stage names like SpaceX or Robinhood, but those trades are harder for a venture fund to justify. Brand recognition creates demand and liquidity, but it does not create enough remaining upside for every buyer seeking venture style returns.
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Across the private liquidity market, the practical workaround has been structured, issuer approved liquidity events. Those processes give investors more information, cleaner cap tables, and more predictable pricing, which matters most precisely when companies are large enough that small differences in growth and valuation can determine whether a deal returns 2x or 5x.
Going forward, the secondary market is likely to split into two lanes. One lane will serve institutions chasing venture like upside in earlier or information rich deals. The other will serve buyers seeking exposure and liquidity in mature private leaders, where the product is less about outsized returns and more about access, quality, and controlled entry before IPO.