Workflow Bottleneck in Private Secondaries
Noel Moldvai and Adam Crawley, co-founders of Augment, on software-enabled secondaries markets
The real bottleneck in private stock trading has been workflow, not demand. In practice, an employee trying to sell shares often bounced between brokers, buyers, lawyers, and company approvals across email and calls, with little visibility into who was serious, what price was real, or how long closing would take. That fragmentation kept most secondaries in a brokered, off platform market even as private company liquidity kept growing.
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SharesPost started as a bulletin board style marketplace, and participants often still needed help finishing the transaction because the hard part was not finding interest, it was handling ROFRs, transfer restrictions, documents, and cap table updates. Those steps could stretch a trade into a 3 to 6 month process.
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That opacity also hurt price discovery. In a thin market with one off brokered conversations, buyers and sellers saw only fragments of demand, which let prices vary widely and made it hard to know if an indicated bid was actually executable. Later platforms added bid and ask data, but fragmentation remained a structural problem.
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The deeper market split is between issuer control and open liquidity. Nasdaq Private Market and Carta leaned into company run tenders, which gave CFOs control but were episodic and slow. Forge, SharesPost, and newer marketplaces chased continuous matching, but still faced company specific rules that made full automation hard.
The market is moving toward software that turns secondaries from bespoke brokerage work into a repeatable system of record. The winners will be the platforms that combine transparent order books, direct counterparty communication, and issuer aware execution so a shareholder can see a real market, pick a buyer, and get to closing without starting from zero each time.