Governance as Gatekeeper for Liquidity
Hari Raghavan, ex-COO of Forge, on late-stage investing and facilitating secondary sales
This marks a shift from private stock trading as opportunistic deal shopping to a market that increasingly rewards companies that already look investable on public market terms. In practice, buyers are screening for clean boards, regular reporting, real revenue growth, and company approved liquidity processes, because late stage secondaries only work at scale when issuers trust the buyers and buyers trust the company’s numbers.
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The early secondary market was messy, with thin trading, weak company control, and buyers chasing hot names with limited information. The next phase moved toward issuer controlled tenders and structured programs, which let companies choose who buys, how much trades, and what gets disclosed.
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For investors, governance is not a soft factor. It changes whether a deal can clear at all. Rights of first refusal, transfer rules, disclosure cadence, and board approval determine whether stock can move cleanly, how long settlement takes, and how much execution risk sits between signing and closing.
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The best late stage names now attract buyers even without steep discounts, while weaker companies get filtered out. That is why the market increasingly clusters around large, fast growing companies with recognizable financial profiles, instead of random private names being pushed through broker channels.
The likely next step is a more stratified private market, where top companies run repeatable liquidity programs and disclose enough to support regular price discovery, while weaker names stay illiquid and broker driven. That pushes private markets closer to a middle ground between classic venture investing and the public markets, with governance becoming a gatekeeper for liquidity, not just a nice to have.