Dedicated secondaries for early-stage
Dan Akivis, senior associate at Expansion VC, on selling secondary and managing LP relationships
Dedicated secondaries work is becoming a real operating function, not a side task, because the bottleneck in early stage liquidity is usually not buyer appetite alone, it is packaging, education, and process. In the interview, secondaries had already become close to a full time job for one early stage fund, even though that was unusual. The work is manual, relationship driven, and often requires creating demand for lesser known names, which is why many smaller funds default to reactive sales only when a company runs a round or tender.
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Late stage names can support specialized workflows because buyers already know the company, can underwrite larger blocks, and often have internal teams focused on secondaries. By contrast, early stage sellers often need to educate buyers name by name, and many sub unicorn companies have little market coverage, which makes selling small positions uneconomic without dedicated effort.
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The internal job is not only finding buyers. It also means handling issuer alignment, managing disclosures, reducing admin burden, and framing sales for LPs as disciplined distributions rather than loss of conviction. In practice, LPs are usually informed after a sale, and periodic distributions are welcomed because they show real DPI, not just paper marks.
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Infrastructure is pushing the market toward specialization. Research on private liquidity argues that recurring auctions and issuer controlled programs can turn off cycle one off sales into something more programmatic. Carta described quarterly and even monthly auctions as a way early investors could sell over time instead of waiting for a single financing window.
The next step is that more venture firms will either hire for this function directly or rely on platforms that effectively provide that team in software and services. As private companies stay private longer, the funds that can systematically create liquidity, communicate it cleanly to LPs, and keep management comfortable will have a real fundraising and portfolio management edge.