Why build entire infrastructure stack for Caplight, including brokerage, settlement, data and research, and not just derivatives marketplace?

I think that this question has a lot to do with the client community that we've decided to serve, at least to start with. The short answer to your question is we have to be the one-stop shop for our clients to get as much value from Caplight as they possibly can.

Our clients are institutional investors in nature. Many of them take on the persona of hedge funds, very large multi-stage VCs, large public investors, some of the folks who typically look like limited partners. I've already mentioned pensions, endowments, insurance companies, and even the large banks, via either their direct investing groups or their private banking clients. All of these groups, clearly, are institutional in nature. They're professional investors. They have this infrastructure available to them in other asset classes, and it doesn't make sense that they don't have the same tools available to them in private markets.

So being able to offer a hedge fund the ability to trade in the private markets, using assets that are already held in prime brokerage, was really important to us, because if we're not doing that, it means that the hedge fund is less likely to go through the friction of putting one of these trades on. We want to make their lives as easy as possible. For us, it wasn't even about trying to figure out all the bells and whistles that could exist in Caplight. It was just a simple, “Well, what would our clients want to experience?” When you put on that lens, it's a no-brainer to have all of these different pieces of infrastructure in the same place.