Programmatic Secondaries Transform Venture Liquidity
Dan Akivis, senior associate at Expansion VC, on selling secondary and managing LP relationships
The real bottleneck in venture is not finding winners, it is getting paid before the rare IPO or acquisition window opens. If an early stage fund could reliably sell part of a position at Series B or Series C, it could turn paper gains into cash on a timetable it controls, recycle capital faster, show distributions to LPs earlier, and avoid building a strategy around a few binary exit events.
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What stops this today is not demand in the abstract, it is missing market infrastructure. Sellers often cannot give buyers enough fresh operating data, companies do not want to spend time educating off cycle investors, and trades still depend on brokers, fragmented networks, and ad hoc outreach rather than a repeatable process.
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This matters most for smaller early funds. A partial sale lets them return cash to LPs and raise the next fund without giving up the whole upside. That is why the fund logic shifts from hold everything until the end to sell enough to clear cost plus a target return, then keep the rest riding.
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The closest public market analogy is not a one time IPO pop, it is continuous portfolio rebalancing. In private markets, recurring secondary programs and regular price discovery would make venture look less like a power law lottery and more like an asset class where ownership can be adjusted over time, similar to how Spotify used active secondary trading to support its direct listing.
The direction of travel is toward a more liquid private market where secondaries become a standard portfolio tool rather than an exception. As more companies stay private longer, the firms that win will be the ones that can combine issuer trust, buyer education, and repeatable sale mechanics into a real secondary channel, because that turns venture from wait and hope into active portfolio management.