Sharks of private secondaries
Dan Akivis, senior associate at Expansion VC, on selling secondary and managing LP relationships
This line points to the core power in private secondaries, the buyers with the best data and the most patience can turn market opacity into price. Large specialist funds know how to value a late stage company with limited disclosure, then bid well below that value so the discount itself becomes their upside. For smaller venture funds trying to sell, that makes secondaries less like a simple trade and more like negotiating against a counterparty that already knows the playbook.
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The practical edge is information. In thin private markets, buyers often work from a handful of metrics, channel checks, cap table relationships, and prior deal flow. That lets them move with conviction while sellers are still trying to explain the company. The result is that price discovery happens in private conversations, not on a visible market screen.
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These funds also need large enough blocks to matter. Dan Akivis notes that a small fund may not even have enough stock for a big secondary buyer to care. That is why smaller sellers often bundle a desirable name with weaker ones, or wait for a structured round, instead of running a clean one company sale.
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This is also why brokers and platforms only partly solve the problem. Matching buyers and sellers is useful, but the real bottleneck is trusted information and issuer alignment. Across the market, most volume still sits in bespoke deals, tenders, and issuer approved processes rather than a true always on exchange.
The next phase of the market is likely to reward whoever can make private stock less opaque without taking control away from issuers. As more companies run repeat liquidity programs, disclose more, and cultivate repeat buyers, the advantage of the sharks should narrow from information arbitrage toward execution and scale.