What is Vested's perspective on secondary market platforms, and who are its primary competitors and potential partners?

It's hard to know which approach is going to win. If you put a gun to my head and made me pick one, I do think the investor-centric approach is maybe a little bit behind the employee and the company-centric approaches, mostly because VC is a great performing asset class. There's been trillions of dollars trying to make its way into the VC asset class for a while. 

As between the employee and the company-centric approaches, I think you can make an argument both ways. At the end of the day, you need to be working with and through companies in order to get full distribution. However, that's a very B2B sales process, and companies don't always have the infrastructure to put a liquidity program together. It's not their first priority. In the short term, on the way toward a fully baked liquidity program you can hand off to an early or mid-stage company, I think working with employees is a pretty good approach because it allows us to scale quickly.

That said, I think we're all going to exist as partners for quite a while. One of the biggest reasons is that, for as long as Carta, Forge, EquityZen and Nasdaq Private Market are serving the companies—or at least being extremely deferential to the companies—as one of their primary constituencies, there are going to be certain things they can't do. Some companies may not be ready to help all their employees at the scale that anybody would like. So we're a clear partner for them, because we can be at arm's length and help the people they're trying to help, but without causing them to bite the hand that feeds them.