Issuer-Driven Timing Limits IRR
Dan Akivis, senior associate at Expansion VC, on selling secondary and managing LP relationships
The real constraint is timing, not willingness to sell. When an early stage fund only gets liquidity during a company led primary or tender, the company decides when a market exists, new investors decide whether secondary is included, and the fund cannot choose the moment that best locks in its own return. That matters most in slower late stage markets, where a company can have years of runway and no need to raise, leaving investors marked up on paper but unable to convert that mark into cash for LPs.
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Dan Akivis is describing a portfolio management problem. Expansion often wants to sell cost plus some upside, then keep the rest invested. But if the only sale window is a structured round, the exit timing is set by the issuer and lead investor, not by the fund’s target IRR or fund life.
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This is why recurring private liquidity matters. Research on privately traded companies argues that periodic auctions or tenders let investors rebalance gradually, return cash to LPs, and avoid the all or nothing choice of either holding 100% or waiting for an IPO. Carta made the same point, that episodic events force sales into someone else’s timeline.
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The bottleneck is information and buyer depth. In the interview, lesser known $100 million to $500 million companies are hard to sell because buyers lack diligence materials and management is not eager to educate off cycle investors. Other market participants make the same point, that liquidity only scales when standardized vehicles and disclosures reduce friction.
The market is moving toward more programmatic private liquidity, where investors can trim positions over multiple windows instead of waiting for a single financing event. As those rails improve, more venture firms will manage distributions the way public investors manage position sizing, with deliberate partial exits rather than hoping the next round arrives on time.