Secondaries as Market Infrastructure
Andrea Walne, GP at Manhattan Venture Partners, on getting on the cap table
Weekly secondary price checks show that late stage private companies already use the market like a shadow earnings tape. Management teams are not just trying to clear employee liquidity. They are watching whether buyers mark the company up or down after a rival raises money, misses numbers, files to go public, or gets fresh press. In practice, secondary pricing becomes the fastest outside signal of how investors think the company stacks up right now.
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This matters because primary rounds are slow and staged. A company may raise every 12 to 24 months, but secondary quotes move in between those events, so finance teams use them to see whether the last round still feels credible or already looks stale.
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The signal is imperfect, because private stock still trades in a fragmented market with brokers, SPVs, and issuer approvals. But that is exactly why companies keep asking trusted secondary buyers for trend lines, not just one off prints, they want repeated reads on market sentiment, not a single negotiated price.
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The closest public market analogue is a thinly traded stock where every block matters. Spotify used repeated private trading and recurring liquidity events to build a pricing history before its direct listing, which shows how private trading can become a bridge from negotiated valuation to market discovered price.
The next step is more companies treating secondaries as ongoing market infrastructure instead of occasional cleanup. That means tighter issuer approved channels, more frequent liquidity windows, and a clearer external price record. As private companies stay private longer, the ones that can manage this feedback loop well will recruit better, refresh their cap tables faster, and arrive at IPO with a market price that already feels familiar.