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Who is feeling the most frustration in private markets & compelled to pursue IPOs - early investors, employees, founders or all of them?
James McGillicuddy
Co-founder & CEO at BRM
Yeah. I think you see it most acutely with the employees and the founders of private companies. For some of these folks, they've been in a company for 10, 12 years, the median tech IPO in 2018 was actually 12 years. And that's a long time with really no liquidity for these individuals. So that's what's primarily driven by it. And at the same time, as the CEO and management team of a late stage private company, you're competing with the Facebooks, the Ubers, the Googles of the world that have liquid stock, and they're losing talent to those other great companies.
So it's really kind of multi-sided, but one, it's the folks that have been with the company that want to take some chips off the table. They want to pay down some student debt. They want to buy a home. They want to start saving for their kid's 529. And on the other side, I said management teams that know that they need some different talent to keep on propelling the company forward, and that talent is used to having liquidity. So that's, I'd say, one of the main reasons why we build CartaX, there's obviously shareholders of the investor side that have been in a company since day one as a seed or angel or a series A investor even. And those folks need to return capital to their LPs as well.
So we're trying to basically get rid of the episodic time constraint for everyone that's associated with the typical episodic liquidity events today, and make it so people can get out of the business or even increase their position in the business over different time periods and horizons.