Brokers Favor Biggest Check Writers
Ani Banerjee, co-founder of Andromeda Group, on secondary diligence and companies staying private
This is really a point about control over who gets onto the cap table. In private market secondaries, the intermediary often gets paid when a trade closes and gets paid more on bigger trades, so the natural bias is toward the investor with the largest check, not the investor a company most wants as a long term shareholder. That matters because late stage companies usually care as much about buyer quality, trust, and future behavior as they do about price.
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Across the secondary market, buyer access is still relationship driven and information is uneven. Large investors usually do not buy blindly, they call existing investors, management, and brokers to get comfortable. That makes the intermediary who controls access unusually powerful in shaping who even gets a real shot at the deal.
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Issuer centric platforms were designed to flip that logic. Instead of a broker shopping a block to whoever can fill it fastest, the company can screen investors, decide who enters an auction, and share deeper information only with buyers it actually wants to cultivate. That makes secondaries look more like deliberate cap table design than pure sales execution.
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Traditional broker led channels still matter because many large blocks and ad hoc trades happen outside formal programs. But the trade off is clear. Brokers are good at moving inventory and servicing institutions, while companies increasingly want infrastructure that lowers admin work, limits information leakage, and preserves trust with employees and existing investors.
The market is heading toward a split model. Brokers will keep handling messy bespoke trades, while the highest quality private companies will push more liquidity into structured, issuer approved channels where investor selection is part of the product. As companies stay private longer, picking the right buyer will become as important as getting the highest price.