What is Sydecar's vision for becoming a core infrastructure for private markets transactions, and how does the company plan to achieve this goal?

The thesis really starts on this notion of standardization in a market that has no standards today. Certainly, in venture alone there is a lot of disarray, disorganization, and no clarity on how you enter the market as an investor today. To me, that does not need to exist. By just distilling the noise and saying, there is a standardized approach to investing at a venture investor, we're putting our flag in the ground and saying, "This is infrastructure that everyone should use in some way and some touch in some way."

We're building it first for ourselves and our audience with a front facing application. This year, we're branching out from there and saying, “We don't need you to use our front facing application to interact with our infrastructure. You can still leverage our ability to create entities, to leverage banking, to handle reporting, to leverage ledgers for really efficient transactions on an SPVs cap table or a fund instructor's cap table Using just our infrastructure via an API,” for example. 

So our thesis for growing in that direction is to start to branch from front facing to integrated and embeddable. Then, the future becomes a lot more clear around how that could work in a sense whether you're a marketplace, an institutional bank, a company like Passthrough, or maybe even an AngelList or a Carta. Rather than build a whole business or a market around a back office and have to worry that it's a cost center, get the efficiencies and benefits of what we've built in the future when it comes to multiple transactions within these vehicles. 

Let's say, you have 10 different marketplaces with 10 different standards. That still doesn't work in a market. A small number of players heightens a need for transparency and standardization. It makes the most sense for us to really stay true to that value prop and push that as long and as hard as possible to as many players as possible to get everyone the benefit of things like liquidity in the future.

We're going to stay true to that. We're starting with the API this year, maybe a white label going into next year. From there, I don't know exactly how we’ll continue to champion it but I know that every single player that adopts our standard helps our momentum.