Repeatable Secondary Windows for Liquidity
Charly Kevers, CFO at Carta, on progressive price discovery and investor relations
The real bottleneck is that a late stage private company has very few clean ways to change who owns its stock without either running a heavy tender process or issuing new shares and diluting everyone. Once a company is worth billions, its cap table starts to fill with former employees, early investors nearing fund end dates, and would be new crossover investors. Without repeatable secondary windows, that mix stays frozen until a major financing or IPO.
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Primary rounds add cash but also create dilution. Secondary sales do something different. They let a company replace or rebalance shareholders using existing shares, which is why CFOs see them as the main lever for cleaning up a cap table before going public.
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Today most issuer controlled liquidity still happens through episodic tenders. They can take months, are operationally heavy, and often move only a small slice of shares. That means a CFO cannot easily make steady quarterly adjustments to employee liquidity, investor mix, and price discovery.
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This is why crossover funds matter so much near IPO. They are not just writing checks. They are the investors a company wants on the cap table before listing, so management can build relationships, establish pricing history, and enter public markets with the right long term holders already in place.
The market is moving toward more regular, software driven secondaries, because private companies are staying large for longer and need a middle state between fully locked private ownership and a public listing. The winners will be the platforms that let companies add liquidity and new investors without losing control over disclosures, transfer rules, and the shape of the cap table.