What are Vested's views on ROFRs in private company share transactions and their associated risks?

Over the course of time, we fully expect to work with companies more and more often. And it's not like we don't work with companies and go through the front door ROFR process today. We do. It used to be the case that we would go to the company CFOs and GCs after a forward contract was done and say, “Hey, it would help us feel more comfortable with delivery risk if you could retitle the shares.” For the most part, we're helping ex-employees, which is not a particular disincentivization risk for them. And we're doing very few (and very small) deals per company, which means that, as soon as we tell them about a deal, they have to deal with the potential huge annoyance of, “All right, somebody just priced our shares somewhere. Do we have to redo the 409A process, which would block the legal and equity team for the next week?” So most companies are happy to let us help their ex-employees out.

On the employee side, whenever an employee wants to go through the company, we would love to for reasons that are obvious. But we tend to be dealing with folks who are in their 90-day option expiration window, and they might not find us on day one. They might find us on day 68. If the ROFR period is a 30-day ROFR period, that makes for a lot of uncertainty for them. So the employees tend to want to go the frictionless way, and that's another reason we do forwards. But it's our full expectation we're going to be working with the companies directly as time goes on.