Brad Gerstner, Gavin Baker, Kelly Rodriques: Inside the Private Stock Market Boom: SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI & the Rise of Secondaries

The session opens with the premise that "Everybody wants access to these private markets." The guests are introduced as Kelly Rodriguez, CEO of Forge; Gavin Baker, managing partner and CIO of Atreides; and Brad Gerstner, whose program Invest America is mentioned. The opening clips state the panel's main themes. One describes a world where the private market becomes "accessible to any US and global investor" and says that the 19 companies in a private-market AI basket "have grown on average 300%." Another says the return on AI has "empirically, factually, unambiguously been possible." A third calls the present "a historic moment right now to get everybody into the game of capitalism."

Slides frame the discussion for a room described as full of allocators looking for distributions. The first chart compares money going into venture capital each year with money coming out. For about five years, much more has gone in than has come out. Even so, secondary-market volume is at a record, roughly double the level of the 2021 peak, which the speaker recalls people thought "was crazy" at the time. The speaker calls the late-stage companies involved "quasi public companies" because their shares are bought and sold every day. A second figure puts purchases of employee secondary shares in companies such as Anduril, Anthropic and SpaceX at 31% of all primary venture activity in 2025.

Secondaries are now competing with IPOs and acquisitions as the principal way that these guys are exiting.

Pricing has reversed as well. Over the previous couple of years, a fund selling shares to secondary buyers might have received 80¢ on the dollar to get the liquidity it needed to return DPI to its LPs. The slide puts the figure at 106 as of Q1, which is a premium to market. The speaker adds that these numbers leave out the "wild west" of SPVs that have recently been unwound, with "People charging 10% load in fees, double carry and a lot of gray market, off market stuff." The moderator then asks two questions. What does this mean for employees, and for how orderly the market is? And are the buyers family offices and high-net-worth individuals who are not discerning and want to "own the name"?

The first answer looks beyond SpaceX. If companies stay private longer, the speaker argues, secondary liquidity is "absolutely necessary," because many employees are "very very wealthy on paper, but actually cash poor." Employees who sacrifice for a company they believe in find it hard when they cannot buy a house for their family. Another participant gives the example of an employee in year seven, eight or nine telling a spouse they are worth 10,000,000 or 30,000,000 on paper while not owning a home. The first speaker adds "or year fifteen" and says that, good or bad, companies are clearly going to stay private for longer.

Asked for the real reason to stay private, one panelist answers, "I don't think there is actually a good reason to stay private longer," and others agree. One explanation offered is blunt: founders do not want to be "under a microscope" and would rather build and have an easier life than face public-market scrutiny. A reply describes this as a perception that private life is easier, freer and more long-term, and disagrees with it.

To argue that public-market discipline helps, the panel retells Facebook's mobile misstep from around 2010 to 2012. Facebook bet on HTML5 rather than native apps. HTML5 was described as a way to make websites look mobile-native at a time when the iPhone's app ecosystem was still small. One participant says they argued with Bret Taylor over apps versus HTML5 and that "Zuck picked Bret." Another adds that Facebook "Spent the next three years unwinding that decision." The bet was described as looking like the future "to a lot of very smart people, including Google, Facebook, but it was not the future."