Private Liquidity as IPO Alternative
Noel Moldvai and Adam Crawley, co-founders of Augment, on software-enabled secondaries markets
Private liquidity is becoming a substitute for one of the main reasons to go public, which is letting employees and investors turn stock into cash without forcing the whole company into quarterly market scrutiny. When companies can run controlled secondaries, they can keep long term investors, refresh the cap table without dilution, and give employees enough liquidity to stay focused instead of pushing management toward an early IPO.
-
In practice, liquidity gives companies three concrete levers. They can let early employees and seed investors sell, replace them with later stage holders better suited for the next phase, and establish a real market price for their stock before any IPO. That makes fundraising, recruiting, and M&A easier while preserving control.
-
The market has moved in this direction because companies stay private much longer than before, while shareholder pressure keeps building. Recent operator interviews describe secondaries shifting from taboo to normal, with issuers now treating them as a retention tool and VC firms using them to return capital to LPs.
-
The constraint is not demand, it is market structure. Brokered deals are slow, fragmented, and often fail on ROFRs and transfer rules. That is why newer platforms are pushing issuer friendly tenders, cap table based structures, and SPVs that bundle many buyers into one line item, so companies can allow liquidity without losing cap table control.
The next step is a gradient between private and public rather than a hard jump. The companies that win will be the ones that make shares liquid in measured, repeatable ways, enough for price discovery and retention, but still controlled enough to choose who owns the business and when full public exposure actually makes sense.