Industry Ventures Founder Hans Swildens - how secondaries became the dominant path for VC exits

Hans Swildens is a partner and Head of Industry Ventures at Goldman Sachs. Industry Ventures is one of the pioneers in the secondary market for venture capital, managing several billion in assets across LP stakes, direct secondaries, and primary fund investments. In October of 2025, Goldman Sachs announced they were acquiring Industry Ventures in a deal worth over $900 million dollars. In this episode of World of DaaS, Hans and Auren discuss: The evolution of secondaries from distressed...

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Auren Hoffman?

  Hello fellow data nerds. Welcome to World of DAS. I'm your host, Orin Hoffman, CEO of Incubate and GP of Flex Capital. Discover more episodes, get weekly data as a service news, original content, articles on data and more at worldofdas.com. That's worldofdas.com. Hello fellow data nerds. My guest today is Hans Wildens. Hans is the founder and managing director of Industry Ventures, which started all the way back in 2000. Industry Ventures is one of the pioneers in secondary market for venture capital, managing several billion across assets, including LP stakes, direct secondaries and primary investments. In October 2025,

• 0:44Auren Hoffman?

  Goldman Sachs announced that they were going to acquire Industry Ventures in a deal worth over $900 million. Hans, welcome to World of DAS.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Thank you, Orin. I appreciate your time and being on our show.

• 0:55Auren Hoffman?

  I'm super excited. Now, you and I have been friends for a long time and you've been doing venture secondaries for a really long time. When you started, it was nothing. It was super small. It was really tiny. There was almost nobody doing it. Last year, I think 70% of all VC exits were to secondaries. Walk me through that last 25-year transition.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  We started doing secondaries after the dot-com collapse in 2000. So, we were one of the handful of first firms that were started to are dedicated to doing secondaries. So, my background, as you know, is as an entrepreneur. I helped my brother start two software companies. The one that was the most successful was Speed Era Networks. So, when I came to the venture market, I came to it from the entrepreneurial side of the market. So, when I looked at the venture business, I didn't want to just create a traditional venture fund because there was already hundreds of those. I wanted to look at how we're going to invest capital in a differentiated way and then have, over time, pick a segment that we think could grow and help the market evolve. So, when we started, it was nascent. Basically, all the transactions that were

• 1:57Speaker 01

  happening in the market were from corporate venture capital funds winding down from some mutual funds selling some assets and some hedge funds liquidating.

• 2:06Auren Hoffman?

  The fund would have invested in, let's say, 30 deals, maybe 10 were still ongoing and there were like ragtag of some good ones, some really bad ones, and you'd buy that remaining fund from these corporate venture capital firms.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Most of the portfolios that we bought were built in 97 to 2000, the bulk of it being 1999, 2000 investments, because that's when the corporate venture funds went from being 100.

• 2:33Auren Hoffman?

  And I assume because of that, many of them were underwater because of the dot com crash.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  I would say the beginning of the secondary market for venture investments was a distressed opportunity. The portfolios were distressed.

• 2:44Auren Hoffman?

  And they just wanted to wind down the fund. They were just like, okay, we don't need to do this anymore. We're X firm and we actually make money selling software, selling widgets or selling consumer packaged goods. We don't need this venture capital arm anymore.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  The companies themselves got distressed too. The corporate entities got distressed and their portfolios got distressed. And then the whole venture market was distressed and then liquidity disappeared. The whole venture market became a distressed market. So the transactions that we were buying were all distressed portfolios from distressed sellers. There were some interesting nuggets in these portfolios and companies that ended up being great, successful businesses. But at the time we were acquiring them, it was more of a counterintuitive value investing strategy of going into the market, looking for distressed deals from distressed sellers with some good assets, but most of the assets were also distressed.

• 3:35Auren Hoffman?

  How big was this? I imagine market was really tiny back then, the secondary market.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  The first couple of years, there was only a couple hundred million dollars per year that was traded. Most of it was in portfolios and most of that was in corporate venture fund portfolios. There were a couple of mutual funds, a couple of hedge funds, but there were about 30 different corporate venture funds that sold their portfolios in a two to three year period. And the pricing was really poor. The pricing went down to 10 cents in the dollar, 20 cents in the dollar, 30, 40 cents in the dollar. So people were taking 60 to 90% losses on their cost. And it was just a very distressed time. Some of the companies went bankrupt too. It was the time when you had Tyco and Williams Communications and Enron and MCI WorldCom. And we had a lot of different companies that were going

• 4:22Speaker 01

  through bankruptcy processes as well that previously started up venture portfolios.

• 4:26Auren Hoffman?

  And give us a sense of the magnitude of how much has changed in the last 25 years? Where are we at today in terms of the broader secondary market?

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Well, the sellers back then were mostly distressed, the portfolios were distressed. I would say that the market's completely changed. Most of what's being sold today, people are taking gains on rather than losses. So it's flipped in that regard. And then most of the sellers are healthy. The transaction types now in this market went from two or three different transaction types to maybe 10 or 20 different transaction types. And the sellers went from a handful of sellers to everybody in the whole market selling. So previously, when we started, venture funds themselves were not selling. And that didn't really become a thing until Facebook triggered the acceptance of that in 2009 and 10.

• 5:12Auren Hoffman?

  And they might be taking some of their position off the table so they can de-risk it a bit.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  That's right. So today, the liquidity of venture itself is difficult. So you're seeing some numbers now that are pretty high, some shocking in terms of the percentage of liquidity coming back to the market, which is the funds and the companies and the shareholders that are secondaries. One number was 70%. I thought that was really high, but then I started digging into it and might have been accurate. I think that came from Tom over at Theory. But when you look at what the market is today, it's really developed into a fully functional, very dynamic market of generating liquidity across company shares, fund positions, direct portfolios, there's even continuation funds. That structure's been created. You've got option exercise loan transactions, which is a market that created. You've got forward transactions that were created.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  So you have the securities that previously the market was illiquid, securities weren't sold very much. And now you've got a very dynamic, large market. We think it's over 120 billion. This year, it should be more than that in terms of transaction volume. And then on top of that, you've got the structuring and sophistication of how securities are being purchased and sold has gone up many different levels. We're probably still in terms of innings, if it was a baseball game, we're probably in inning five in terms of sophistication, maybe four. So we have a lot to continue to innovate on here. But I would say the market's gotten highly sophisticated, helping venture funds get liquidity on their portfolios, helping their LPs get liquidity on their portfolios, having corporate venture funds, hedge funds, mutual funds, traditional limited partners like endowments,

• 6:45Speaker 01

  foundations, pension funds, pretty much all the constituents in the venture business today, from the GP side, the LP side, and the direct side are all using secondaries for liquidity management.

• 6:56Auren Hoffman?

  And not only that, I think a lot of them are actually buying secondary. It used to be like the buyers or secondaries were like you guys and maybe some Ken Sawyer from Saints and Ben Black from Acadian and maybe like 137 came at some point. But now it's the big venture capital firms are also selling secondaries and they're buying secondaries too.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  It's similar to what's happened in the buyout market. So when we look at history and trends and the data, which is important, what's happened is our market, the venture in tech growth market has been borrowing and adding in liquidity structures that have been in the private equity market, which is mostly LBOs, but also traditional buyout in terms of how they've been getting liquidity. So pre 2000 buyout funds didn't sell to other buyout funds. And then between 2000 and 2009, it became over 50% of all exits were buyouts funds selling their companies to other buyout funds. So they called that sponsor to sponsor exits.

• 7:51Auren Hoffman?

  It's extremely rare today to not sell to another PE fund.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  That's right. And our market's moved into that realm. So the big hot question that we'll have to ask ourselves here is, is this going to change? And every year we think that it might change in terms of go back to IPOs, creating liquidity, traditional strategic M and A, creating liquidity. But every year the number keeps accelerating and the market becomes more of a sponsor to sponsor market. So if we're sitting here and last year, if that number is accurate, the 70% of all liquidity was from secondaries seems high, but if it was accurate, that's more of a buyout to buyout market. And if we're in that zone, it might not change because the private equity market hasn't changed. They're not getting more liquidity in different avenues today than they were before. They are getting more liquidity with continuation funds.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  So that's like the one thing over the last 10 years that's accelerated in the buyout market is instead of going sponsor to sponsor, they're going sponsor to secondary fund CV. So they're continuing to hold their portfolio companies.

• 8:52Auren Hoffman?

  Which is kind of like the same GPs.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  So we have that in our market, which started accelerating about a year, two years ago.

• 8:59Auren Hoffman?

  Sequoia has one and a few other well-known companies have built one as well.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  As you know, I can't talk specific deals, but there are a lot of larger platform venture capital firms that have been using continuation funds as a means to get liquidity back to their LP base.

• 9:15Auren Hoffman?

  Even the LPs themselves seem to be somewhat sophisticated where sometimes the venture fund will give the LP the option of whether they want to sell their stake. Or like, I'm an LP in a couple of funds. One of them, let's say is in Stripe, the other one's in SpaceX. And I've seen multiple things come in almost every year, multiple times I've had the option of selling my stake or a portion of my stake into some secondary. So the fund says, hey, you can keep writing it or you're not. Whereas before the fund would just make a decision, either sell or not sell for me.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  We call those GP LEDs, but they're giving the LP the decision. So the GP is leading the secondary sale, but they're giving the option to the LP to either sell or hold. There's also the LP side, which is if you're an LP not fund and you just want to get total liquidity and not get partial liquidity, you can go and sell your LP stake as well. There has been a lot of innovation around the GP LED market in the venture business. I would say we're very early in the innings there. We're probably in inning two, when if you look at the buyout market, they're in inning six or seven. So they've been doing continuation funds in that structure for a long time over the last 10 years. So the LPs that are in both buyout and venture funds have been very familiar with that because they've been getting the same option in the buyout funds and they've been starting to try to teach the venture funds how to do it.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  There was a period of time where ILPA, which is a governing body of limited partners, they are going through decisions whether or not it was a good or bad thing in terms of these continuation funds and how it's going to develop in the buyout market. And I think what they determined over time is it's a good thing as long as there's an option given to the LPs because the LPs can continue to go if they want to continue on and not sell, or they can sell if they want liquidity. And so as long as there's an option to select yes or no, and it's not forced, you've seen that the LP market embrace it because it gives them another option to get liquidity. They don't have to if they don't want it.

• 11:06Auren Hoffman?

  And every LP may have a different time horizon, may have different needs so they can make a decision, which I think is great. I mean, it does create the burden, but it is really great.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  You just want to give people the option to decide on their own themselves is the reality.

• 11:20Auren Hoffman?

  Now, also, employees have more options as well because these companies are running tender offers because they're staying private for longer and they're controlling all these different things. Nowadays, if your company's doing super well, what is the incentive to even go public? Why don't I just stay private forever? In some ways, maybe Stripe or SpaceX, they stay private forever.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  If you're leading one of these businesses and you are the founder and CEO still, which in those two cases, that's still the case, you might decide not to ever go public. If the markets are functioning and letting you generate liquidity and raise capital, if you need it in a manner that's better for you in terms of the business, better for you managing the business, also better for the business itself, you're just going to stay private as long as you can. And as long as they continue to offer liquidity to shareholders, offer liquidity to the LPs that are in these funds that are shareholders, and the market's functioning, getting people the liquidity they need, there's nothing to force someone to go public.

• 12:16Auren Hoffman?

  Plus, public has all these burdens.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  If you're in that zone of you're able to do this and you're able to have the liquidity that you're managing, do it often enough and have it at scale enough, which are two difficult things to do, there's not a need to go public. And why would you? Because you can continue to offer liquidity to your shareholders and also the shareholders' LPs in a format that makes them happy, as well as you can go run your business and make long-term investments and be more strategic with it, maybe not generate as much cash flow as you would have to if you were public and reinvest that into growth and continue to compound at rates that you might be able to not compound at if you were public. So there's an incentive. If you want to continue to grow at a certain compounded rate, reinvest your profits and not run it as a public company,

• 13:00Speaker 01

  which would mean you'd have to be more profitable, you're incentivized to stay private. So yeah, it's not a surprise. I think the issue there is that you need two things. You need the amount of demand for your stock to have lots of capital available when you have your window of liquidity that it's filled. You need to be able to fill your equity window. And then you need to have enough growth in your business and you'd be performing well enough where you can go execute on that as well. So it's tricky. You've seen some of these companies fall out of that window where they used to be able to do tenders and now they're not, or they are still doing tenders and they're able to do bigger and bigger ones.

• 13:34Auren Hoffman?

  Would it be better to be a fallen public company at that time? Doesn't seem like that's the better option.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Maybe, maybe not, because as a public company, you might be trading at a dollar. And then if you're not more than five bucks, you can't be in a mutual fund new portfolio purchase and stuff like that. The answer is it depends, but you could be put in a penalty box as a public business where suddenly your securities are restricted from being purchased by mutual funds, hedge funds and others, just due to how much liquidity your stock has per day, what the price per share and your valuation is. If you're stuck in that part of the public market, you're actually probably better off being in the private market because you might have a better option for raising capital.

• 14:13Auren Hoffman?

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• 14:54Auren Hoffman?

  Seems like in almost every scenario, it's better to be private unless you're like a meme stock or you capture the imagination of the consumer investor somehow, which many companies have. And then it becomes even easier to raise capital or something. But if you can't capture, if you're just a boring enterprise software company, it seems like unlikely you're going to capture the imagination of the public investor.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  I'd say it's tricky. The game is tricky. If you were a CEO and running one of these businesses, you don't want to run into a situation where you can't continue to do the liquidity structures. Or you don't want to be in a situation where you try to do quarterly liquidity or monthly liquidity programs and then nobody does them anymore, funds them anymore. So I would say you're in the public market, which is liquid every second or every millisecond. People can get liquidity at any time. I think the risk people have with this, which there's obviously a trade off when you decide to do things like this, is that the liquidity windows are finite. They're typically once a quarter, so they're episodic. And then the demand for the shares or for the liquidity, to provide the liquidity is potentially episodic as well.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  And then the valuations are episodic. So it's not something that is super liquid that can be worked on all the time. The hedging of the securities also is not as good because we don't have a good way to hedge these private securities when in the public markets, you have the derivative markets. And then in terms of raising debt, as a public business, it's easier to raise debt because there's a larger buyer universe of people that will provide the debt due to you being public and some of the requirements is you need to be public.

• 16:30Auren Hoffman?

  And they can understand your financials better.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, you just need to be public. You don't have to go into the private credit markets, which is what you would do if you're a private business. You can just go into the more liquid public credit markets. So there's reasons to go public.

• 16:43Auren Hoffman?

  Even that has changed dramatically. The private credit markets have grown even in the last few years.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's more and more private credit buyers and private credits become a huge asset class on its own, providing the credit to these private companies.

• 16:56Auren Hoffman?

  And many PE firms are also private credit firms.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  And you're starting to see VC funds being private credit firms too, by the way. So you'll see more and more credit products coming out of venture funds as well.

• 17:07Auren Hoffman?

  You think we'll see more even to earlier stage, we'll start to see credit happen?

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Definitely. The credit markets are the part of the market that I think is going to have more and more innovation on the venture growth side than people think.

• 17:20Auren Hoffman?

  That makes a lot of sense because today it is a little bit opaque. It's hard to do it and you could start to see a lot more innovation. And now we're seeing more VCs and RAs where just a few years ago, that was more rare to see VCs or RAs. And today Andreessen and others are, so they will have more opportunities for these VCs to get into things like lending and other things that before they were excluded from.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Exactly. You're going to see a lot more innovation in our market and venture growth. The credit markets are going to have a lot of innovation here. And then I think in the equity markets, you're going to see that have some more innovation, too. And then also fund structures and how funds are raised and the duration of those funds. I think you're going to see a pretty massive change in the next 10 years of how that works in terms of just how people raise venture funds and also secondary funds.

• 18:08Auren Hoffman?

  You mean they're going to raise it more from consumers or?

• 18:11Speaker 01

  I think you're going to see both. They're going to have private vehicles that are long duration, permanent capital hedge fund like vehicles. More and more of those.

• 18:20Auren Hoffman?

  With a yearly liquidity opportunity for the people in there?

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there already are in our market, less than a dozen of those. And I think you're going to see that structure continue to evolve.

• 18:32Auren Hoffman?

  And they just market, because today it seems like the marks for these private companies are a bit all over the place. It's easier to mark on a public company, but you don't think there'll just be a more coalescing of how they mark these marks?

• 18:45Speaker 01

  I think that the valuation, how things are valued in this market for the last 25 years has been improving and improving, improving. For an A valuations, we didn't have FAS 157 valuations. If you go back 25 years ago, there wasn't really a good valuation construct of third-party valuations.

• 19:02Auren Hoffman?

  Often you just make it up and stuff.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think that valuation sophistication in the market's been increasing. And there's been third parties, multiple different third-party valuations are done, both at the company level and at the fund level and at the security level in the fund. That's getting better and better and I think becoming more standard. So if you look back, why do thousands of venture funds today use the same limited partnership agreement they did in the eighties? Why is there a 10-year term, two one-year extensions? Why does it exist when it's outdated? And the number of firms that, whose venture funds last until you're 10 and then they liquidate them, or in your 12 and they're liquidated is dwindling.

• 19:43Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, usually you get the LPAC to extend it and then you keep getting extending it.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  There's like, you're 13, 14, 15.

• 19:51Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, I'm an LP in funds that have been there for 20 years.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  That's right. So the construct, I think, of the underpinning of the legality and the terms and conditions of how venture funds raise capital, I think, is going to evolve. And you're starting to see that evolve now. And then I think in terms of the LPs that are in the fund, if it is a partnership, because it could be not a partnership itself. If it's the LPs that are changing. So you have the situation that historically venture was funded by a set of high net worth billionaire families as well as endowments in the 80s. And now you have a situation where you've got the largest growing pool of capital is individual retail and high net worth capital is flowing into the venture business. And that is something that's happened over the last five to 10 years. And it's continuing to accelerate.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  And then you've seen some structural things with recently planned 401k access to the private markets being approved and other things of structural changes making to different security laws that are allowing more access to private securities. How that's going to affect the actual investor base of a venture fund like you, the one that you manage. I think that's going to change over the next 10 years dramatically of the type of investors that are investing.

• 21:04Auren Hoffman?

  Today, you have things like QSBS and you have different tax rates. So for the individual US taxpayer, for a fund like us, Flex Capital, most of our LPs are actually high net worth individuals because the after tax return is just so dramatically different. If you're getting QSBS and some of these other nice things that happen when you're investing in this economy.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  Especially if you're a California taxpayer.

• 21:28Auren Hoffman?

  Well, California doesn't get QSBS, but if you're a New York taxpayer, you get like massive gains for this.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  QSB is pretty important in terms of your underlying, if you're a seed investor and you qualify for a QSB treatment. And then if the capital base in your fund is like yours more individuals, how your partnership is going to be structured in the future, in the next 10 years, I think is going to change. So there's lawyers in the market, the GPs in the market are evolving now in terms of their thoughts. The LPs that are coming into the funds are requiring different things. So some of the registered investment advisors or wealth managers now want tender offer funds or registered funds that have liquidity structures in them rather than just a normal limited partnership. They don't want a K1 going back to their investors that they're managing money. They just want it flowing through like a normal mutual fund report would. And there's no delay in a K1.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  They don't have to collect K1s. It's already just in their accounts.

• 22:22Auren Hoffman?

  K1s are super annoying.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  So you've got administrative needs, you've got capital liquidity needs, you've got capital, the type of capital that's coming in, their investment size, their qualification, it's all changing. So you're never going to have the traditional venture fund structure probably get completely changed, but I think that there's going to be a lot of innovation here. And especially if the credit markets on the venture growth side start evolving and that's added into these vehicles, then you're going to start having situations where you have a vehicle and it might hold equity and credit. And the credit is a yielding credit which could pay for redemptions off of the investor base. So even if the equity, you can't get redemptions or get generate liquidity there, you've got liquidity with a debt sleeve. So that will evolve into more of a perpetual vehicle that you could offer to investors. So you've got a lot of

• 23:08Speaker 01

  innovation happening, I think, on the fund side of how things are going to evolve.

• 23:12Auren Hoffman?

  For an investor like Flex, what would be your advice? Like we're often, we have these opportunities, we're investing in a company at seed. Now the company is raising at a multiple, let's say billion dollar plus valuation. We have an opportunity to potentially sell some of our stake in it, but we also want to be supportive of the company. We don't want to show that we're a seller because we want to have that relationship with the founder. We get a lot of referrals. So often we don't do it because of that. How do you think firms like us should start to think about this in a more sophisticated way?

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Well, I think that's the one thing that the venture fund managers themselves need to spend time on. And a lot of them are, and some of the larger firms that have more capital and people are staffing full-time people to deal with this question. So liquidity management, fund management, investor liquidity, company liquidity management. So there are partners now that are being hired or managing directors at these larger venture funds, and that's their sole job. That happened in the buyout fund market already. It's happening now in the venture fund market.

• 24:12Auren Hoffman?

  Sometimes there's like a separate partner whose job it is to decide.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. All they are doing is this. So the question is one that's hard to answer unless you understand the situation of where the fund is in. Is the fund a hundred percent return? Does the fund have a 25% net IRR? Is it sitting there with 100% DPI and 25% net IRR? And is it at a 4X? So if it's that, then maybe you don't need to sell. Maybe you should hold and keep compounding because your investor base and your LP would rather have you hold and keep compounding and go for a 7X fund instead of a 4X fund. You can take more risk. But if your fund has no DPI, if your fund's at a negative IRR or a single-digit IRR, and you have an option to take 20% of a position off at a 10x return, I would say you should probably do that for your

• 25:00Speaker 01

  own LP management, your fund management, and being a fiduciary to the LPs, I think it's the right fiduciary decision to get some liquidity because you had none and the returns haven't started showing up yet in the book. So that helps generate some returns in the book because you're having an exit, you're marking your NAV to that value, and then you're getting some DPI. So if you're improving your IRR and DPI and getting it to a point where you can return all your capital, plus have a nice net return to your investors, you're doing your job, I'd say. We do that in our own funds. We manage our own funds and have liquidity plans and structures around each one of our funds. We have portfolio analysts that is looking at every single fund, every single position, trying to determine what sort of liquidity we need on the fund.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  I think the word that is being used out there, which I think is the right word, is manufacturing liquidity. Venture itself, in the old days, nobody ever manufactured liquidity. It just shows up.

• 25:52Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, you just wait.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  If you talk to older venture capitalists, and now we're one of those, but like the ones that are even older than us, they'll say, oh, companies are never sold, they're always bought. If the company is good enough company to go public, it will. And there's this situation where, you know, let your winners run and let the market generate liquidity for you, which is the way it was. But now you're seeing that that doesn't exist anymore, or it's changed. So now it's about manufacturing liquidity. So people need to start thinking about how to manufacture liquidity. It's not only through secondaries, by the way, it's also through tech buyout. So tech buyouts, it's 25% now of all exits to venture funds. It used to be 2%, now it's 25%. So private equity firms are coming in and buying these venture capital

• 26:34Speaker 01

  funds either as add-ons to their existing private portfolio companies, or as new portfolio companies, as like a new co, and then using it to aggregate and make it a core holding in their buyout fund. So I think venture funds also need to understand how to exit their companies to buyout funds, which historically they haven't done as much, but it's happening more and more. And when buyout funds buy companies, they also typically offer a rollover. So there's a need to understand when a buyout fund comes in, how do you act with the buyout fund so that you can either do a rollover, or not do a rollover, or partial rollover? So there's situations where if someone's coming in and buying your position, you own 20% of it, you could sell all of it to the buyout fund, you could sell half of it to the buyout fund, roll half, you could sell two-thirds of it and roll a third into the

• 27:17Speaker 01

  buyout. So there's different ways with buyout funds to manage liquidity of your own positions there, too. And I think a lot of venture funds don't understand that when a buyout fund comes in, that they actually just roll their whole stake, or they could roll half their stake.

• 27:30Auren Hoffman?

  I think we had four of those happen in 2025. And maybe we had one that happened in 2024. In some cases, we sold 45%, some cases we sold 20%, some cases we sold 100%. It really depended on the situation.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  That's why this has become a full-time job.

• 27:46Auren Hoffman?

  You guys also have a fund of funds, and I could see how fund of funds works really well with the secondary part of the business. But what have you learned just from the fund of funds side of things?

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Our hybrid fund of funds is a mix of primary commitments to venture funds that are small, typically sub 150 million of fund size. So we're focusing it on the smaller venture funds. And then we're also doing co-investments in buying secondaries in the funds, early secondaries through the same partnership itself. And that's for generating the right liquidity model in our fund.

• 28:18Auren Hoffman?

  And you guys won't even invest in SPVs that these funds do.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  That's right. So we do co-investments through SPVs, per rata right co-investing, we do direct investing, we do LP purchases of the small funds, and we do primary commitments to these small funds. So we have one of the largest programs in the US of doing that. We've got 150 small venture funds we've done this with. It's one of the largest portfolios.

• 28:40Auren Hoffman?

  That's a lot, by the way. I mean, really means you're one of the biggest LPs in terms of number of funds.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  On a number of funds, for sure. In terms of dollar amounts, we'd have to figure out where we sit there. So we're one of the larger by number of funds investors in the US into small venture funds. And we probably have one of the most active new fund commitment portfolios in the market in terms of funding new venture funds.

• 29:05Auren Hoffman?

  When I look at the market, it is kind of interesting how like all these things are somewhat competing with each other. You're an LP in all these funds. In fact, some of the other biggest LPs that I know of in all these funds are like Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel. They're in so many of these funds as well, maybe individually, maybe not part of their fund, but still somewhat related. They're doing secondaries, you're doing secondaries, you're doing primaries now. So all these things are like somewhat converging in an interesting way in the market.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  I think that was kind of misunderstood by a lot of people related to the venture market. And I actually misunderstood it myself for a while as an entrepreneur is the larger equity investors in the venture business that manage larger pools of capital end up investing capital throughout the market. So we, in our secondary funds, bought some LP portfolios from some of the most sophisticated, largest equity investors in this market and their individual, personal accounts. And that historically really wasn't a thing. But what's happened is as the asset class has grown and grown and grown, and as their fund sizes have grown and grown and grown, they've continued to. Participate personally or through their funds, but a lot of it's been personal into these smaller funds.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  So you have the situation where you've got a collective, Karritu is probably the right word of networks. Cause they cross, for example, our relationship with you. We were an investor in LiveRamp. We did secondaries in LiveRamp. We also are an LP in Flex through secondaries.

• 30:28Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, we've had a long relationship of working together.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  One of the reasons why I was excited to talk to you and why I do some of these things sometimes is because it's with people that we've known and worked with for so long. But if you look at that, what happens to you if you've been in this industry for 25 years and you're becoming at scale with your capital bases? You end up participating in different ways with all the people that you used to participate with. As an entrepreneur, you become an LP in their fund. You used to work with them. You become an investor in their seed round of their company. You end up having this collective network effect. So it's most of the people that are running these larger asset management or venture capital platforms are invested throughout all the market. Sequoia has a fund of funds for smaller funds. They have their scout program. They've got their seeding program. They've got all these different things. And so it's not just early stage venture capital there anymore.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  And the same thing's happened with all the other platforms as they've developed into multi-stage, multi-product, multi-LPGP hybrids. I think in terms of like just venture itself, this is how the business works. People switch between being entrepreneur, being an investor, being an investor, being back to an entrepreneur. You've got capital trying to work with the best people in the market that are creating value. And so the capital finds a way to flow into these different structures with different people.

• 31:40Auren Hoffman?

  When I think of traditional private equity, I don't really think power law. But when I think venture, even secondary, it seems like it's so driven by these massive outcomes that happen. Do you see that as a big difference or do you disagree? Or how do you see the markets?

• 31:55Speaker 01

  That one I disagree, just because when you look at secondary funds returns and you look at on a deal by deal basis. Traditionally, secondary funds underwrite transactions to a lower multiple and a higher IRR. And so the way the market prices securities in the secondary market is to a lower multiple and a higher IRR is if you're doing your job right. And so like when you have a secondary fund and you look at your portfolio, construction of all the deals you're doing and everything. It's actually the reverse of a venture fund where you want to have a low loss rate.

• 32:27Auren Hoffman?

  So more like a private equity fund.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  Looks like a private equity fund in a way, but it's more indexed. So because you have less chunkier positions. And so you've got to be more accurate around what's going to be selling for 2X or whatever return you're underwriting to within a certain period of time. And because your multiples are an average lower than a venture fund, they should be. Or more of like a traditional buyout fund, you're going to have more and more deals that are going to have lower and lower multiples. You're going to have higher IRRs. If you're managing that correctly, and if you're managing your portfolio correctly, it's between a venture fund and a debt fund portfolio construction. It looks more like a traditional private equity fund in a way. Maybe the positions in the fund are 100 positions, not 10 or 20 positions. And so you have a situation where it has a yield to it.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  You are generating, even if you do 100 deals and you're wrong on timing of half of them. And you're right on the timing on the other half, maybe some will be accelerated exits, some will be delayed exits. When you do your construction, you'll see over time that it operates a little bit more like a hybrid between a traditional venture fund and a credit fund. And that's the right way to think about it. There are outliers events in these venture secondary funds, which happen in venture funds because that's just venture itself. But typically, when you remove those from these funds, it looks more of like a hybrid construction between a credit and equity fund.

• 33:42Auren Hoffman?

  Now, acquisition of venture funds and funds in this market are incredibly rare. Obviously, you guys agreed to sell to Goldman Sachs, which I thought was very, very interesting. Do you think those types of acquisitions are going to become more common in the future? Where the funds themselves will sell, not just secondary?

• 34:02Speaker 01

  I do. I went back and did a set of predictions like four or five years ago. And then I ran the article through chat GPT to see what was accurate. And this was one of the predictions that was actually not that accurate. So maybe due to our deal, it becomes more accurate. But yeah, I predicted for a long time that there's going to be more consolidation in the venture business. It makes sense. If you go and talk to the large publicly traded asset managers that historically come from the buyout market, but now are multi-strat, multi-asset management companies. In the US, there's over a dozen really large ones. And if you go talk to the CEOs of these firms, most of them don't have a venture growth part of their business. So I think you'll see them add that. I think all of them, because I've talked to most of them, all of them have been considering adding it.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Some of them have decided not to now. Some of them are thinking about it. But I think overall, it's an asset class that makes sense to have as part of a multi-strategy firm.

• 34:57Auren Hoffman?

  Once there's enough fees, it's very easy to model, at least on the fees, what's going to happen. But on the carry, it's a lot harder to understand. And then, of course, even these venture funds are often driven by a small number of people who could walk out the door. So structuring these acquisitions, I imagine, are super difficult to do.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  You've had that happen in life sciences more. So like, there was a handful of life science firms that were acquired.

• 35:21Auren Hoffman?

  There were. What's the history of that? I don't think I'm aware of it.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  So the ones that were public, I think Blackstone acquired Claris. There's a list of about five of these that were purchased.

• 35:32Auren Hoffman?

  These are like venture funds in the bio world and the healthcare world?

• 35:37Speaker 01

  That's right. And then they've developed the strategies on the life sciences side of the market to invest capital across the innovation cycle of life sciences. And that includes drug discovery and financing, drug development and drug royalties and things like that.

• 35:52Auren Hoffman?

  So you want to go like full stack from the beginning all the way to with public companies or something like that?

• 35:57Speaker 01

  That's right. So you've seen five of them that were like that, where they bought a specific biotech VC manager, if you want to call it that, and then expanded what they were doing to help with different types of investments across the life sciences cycle. So I think that was the first area that was added to some of these larger firms. And then you also had every one of these larger firms add a secondary fund strategy. That's more private equity focused. You had areas by Landmark, you had Blackstone by Strat Partners, which was from Credit Suisse. You can go down the list and either they've built or bought a traditional secondary fund business that's focused mostly on private equity and credit, but they've expanded them into real estate and infrastructure and things.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  So in terms of venture and growth, I think you're going to see more and more of these types of firms go into this asset class. And I think you're going to see them go into it with acquisitions as well as organic in-house development. It's both. And it just makes sense because the asset class is big enough now where it's large enough for them to add it. It used to be too small. And then if you think about it strategically, if all your capital's put in credit, real estate, private equity, infrastructure, Some of those industries are going to be completely changed by AI, either in a positive or negative way. Wouldn't you want to have a portfolio of companies that are dealing with new technologies and AI and developing to apply them to your industrial and traditional private equity businesses to accelerate EBITDA,

• 37:23Speaker 01

  accelerate growth, which is what you're doing there anyway with your operating teams?

• 37:28Auren Hoffman?

  And it seems like there's a synergy where they really can help each other if the acquisition is done correctly.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  I think that's extremely synergistic. It's very strategic because what you're seeing, not only is value creation happening more on capital in the private markets, but you're seeing this AI innovation cycle, which is only three years old, at least with the LLMs, is going to dramatically affect all these other industries and how they integrate that, develop products and services on it and then sell that through to their customer bases because it is probably going to continue whether or not their investments are successful or not in the future. Because they strategically are going to have to have these technologies in their operating companies to have them compete against the other competitors they have that are in these traditional industries.

• 38:08Auren Hoffman?

  It seems like so many wealth management companies have been acquired over the last couple dozen years. Do you see that's like a similar trend here or is that a model that we can look to?

• 38:20Speaker 01

  I think that you've seen hyper consolidation in the wealth management sector. It's continuing to accelerate. Most of the friends I have that have created their own wealth management firms have either sold them or they've been getting bids almost on a monthly basis to have someone buy them. So I think that whole sector is going to continue to consolidate. And it's not only in the US, it's going to do that worldwide.

• 38:40Auren Hoffman?

  Industry Ventures itself has like this great brand. If you recall Goldman Sachs Secondary Fund or I don't want to speak to you, but.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  Well, thank you for saying that our brand is good.

• 38:51Auren Hoffman?

  Part of the value of acquiring it is the brand. And sometimes in B two B software, they'll call the Oracle Random Marketing Cloud and they'll kill the brand and all of a sudden they kill 50% of the value of the company. How do you think they should be thinking about it in this case?

• 39:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, they've already thought about it and we've already made a decision to keep it because of what you said, plus the fact that in the org that we're going to be a part of, which is the Goldman Sachs Asset Management, there's a division called XIG, which is their External Investing Division. That group, the funds themselves have to have a different name than Goldman Sachs due to regulatory reasons. So we're just going to keep all the industry venture's names.

• 39:32Auren Hoffman?

  Oh, interesting. Okay. So it makes the decision easy, actually.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, the decision's there. We had to have a different name for the funds anyway, and the brand's good. So we've all decided to keep the brand moving forward. It's a nice thing to have, and it's relevant in our market since we've been in the market for 25 years and we've got such a large portfolio. We're going to keep the brand and keep the funds under that brand name.

• 39:52Auren Hoffman?

  It's great also because you probably have had hundreds of thousands of swag over the year. So you don't have to get rid of all the swag.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  We don't have to get one of the swag off. There was some swag they have. That's really nice, though.

• 40:02Auren Hoffman?

  That's true. It's a good point. I'll take some Goldman swag as well.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  We've tried to make a point of having good swag over here.

• 40:08Auren Hoffman?

  We've seen also like a different type of person who's going into venture capital, going into these careers today than maybe in the past. How do you think that will evolve?

• 40:17Speaker 01

  I think that it's going to depend on how the fund structures and the capital flows evolve. So I think you've got to backward integrate that one. I think today, what we've seen in the last 10 years, we might not see in the next 10 years. So there's a little bit of what's happened. You can't assume it's going to continue to happen.

• 40:34Auren Hoffman?

  Because we have these solo GPs, we have these rolling funds, we had all these other experiments.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  In 2009, when we started funding solo GP funds, the normal LP market didn't want to do it. So it was similar to the secondary market where everyone didn't understand why you'd want to do that. And so it's definitely counterintuitive again. But in the last 15 years or so, we've seen the solo GPs explode. When we started, there was 30 solo GPs. Now there's 1,000 plus solo GPs. So in the future, if the solo GPs are still able to raise capital from mostly individuals, it'll continue to run. Part of the reasons why we think that the solo GP and the small fund market has exploded in terms of number of managers is because there's been this retail demand, this individual capital demand coming into this market, and a lot of it's being filled in these smaller funds. So, for example, you

• 41:23Speaker 01

  said earlier that most of your capital in your funds are kind of with individuals. And so that is the case throughout the market. There are some funds that get raised that are small funds that get anchored by an endowment or get anchored by a large family office that's historically been traditionally anchoring venture funds. But most of the LPs that are coming into these new funds, it's a mix of where the flow is coming from, where the demand's coming from. I think you'll start seeing the individual investors wanting to have structures that provide them more liquidity than they have today. I think if this market stays a liquid, like it's been continuing to stay liquid, and the avenues for exit are secondaries, tech buyout, and to lesser extent IPOs and M&A, you're going to have to see the partnerships evolve and what they do. And maybe your fund

• 42:06Speaker 01

  will look more like a hedge fund next time, where it's open-ended, it's no term, you've got a redemption feature, you've got these things in your partnership, maybe there's a firm that provides the redemptions, you deal with an outside firm to provide that redemption mechanism, and someone comes in and signs an exclusive deal to provide redemptions into your partnership, or maybe it's not exclusive because you have to offer it to most people, but you have three or four that go in there that provide a market for the redemption price, or maybe you mandate the redemption price as NAV, and then the redemption can happen or not happen depending on if the buyer party wants to take that redemption. So you've got a situation where your structure of how you're structured, who's investing into you, what you're doing, I think is going to change. I think in the next 10 years, you're going

• 42:49Speaker 01

  to see this industry evolve and become highly institutionalized.

• 42:54Auren Hoffman?

  When I meet a high net worth of people, I'm surprised how few of them have any exposure to venture. They've got the traditional things, they've got the bond portfolio, they're in the S and P 500, they're in private credit funds, they're in some PE funds, they've got a few other things that are out there. They've got real estate, of course, but so many of them have zero exposure to up and coming tech, what's going on in tech, and so much of that is driving the real economic returns.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Now you're agreeing with me. We see it every day on the demand side of the funds when they go to raise capital. We have an LP portfolio here of over 800 venture funds. There's 325 managers. So when they're raising, we're seeing where the capital's coming from because we're investing in some of these. And we always ask, where's the capital coming from? And more and more of it's coming from individual high net worth investors. And that demand that you're citing there hasn't been solved yet. So that means there's going to be more and more and more of it. I think that the negative of that capital is that sometimes it's not as long term as an endowment, foundation, pension fund that can have a whole period of 15 years and not ever need liquidity ever. Maybe it's because their capital has more inflows than outflows. They're compounding their capital and it's growing and growing

• 44:07Speaker 01

  and growing. So they actually will never need a redemption. But on the individual side, there's a lot of need for liquidity. And it's things like death, divorce, mundane things, like maybe they want to buy a house, just things like that. Maybe they want to fund a wedding or whatever, and they need capital.

• 44:22Auren Hoffman?

  And managing the LPs is hard. The good news is diversity is good. So having more customers is better. Just like any, if you are a tech company and you have one customer that's 20% of your revenues, it's never as good. So diversity is good. But then of course, you have to manage all these customers.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  In the typical LPGP structure you're in, it's a heavy admin burden if you have people redeeming partial stakes, full stakes.

• 44:46Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah. And you have to call them and talk to them. And maybe that's a benefit because they can help your portfolio. But it's a whole different way of thinking about it, rather than having some endowment that's out there and you go to the University of Indiana or something.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Now, we're starting to get on the same page here. That's why the construct of your fund that you're managing is going to change, I think. Because once your competitors' funds and everybody else's changed, then you're going to have to change. Because if I'm an LP and you start pitching me your current structure, I'm going to go, well, why don't I have a liquidity mechanism? Why don't I have a redemption feature? If I'm going to give you a million dollars, I just want 100 grand back. Why can't I just do that? And if someone else is presenting him something that does that and you don't, you might not be able to raise capital.

• 45:26Auren Hoffman?

  Even the whole idea of capital calls is weird. Now all of a sudden I have this burden and I get this 10% capital call and have to do it and have to call my wealth advisor to send the wire. It's just weird to think about how to do that.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  And in a permanent fund structure, when they invest, there's already a portfolio there. So they just buy what's there. It's not about, here's a dollar, I'm going to draw it down over time to all these new things. When you invest into a mutual fund, you buy the basket. And as their capital grows, they buy new stocks, move stocks around. So I think that the fund management is going to change too, in terms of how you construct your portfolio, how you add things, the whole manufacturing liquidity aspect is going to change. I think that the venture model in the next 10 years is going to be different than it is today.

• 46:10Auren Hoffman?

  Almost certainly. I mean, it's changed so much in the last 10 years and that change seems to only be accelerating going forward.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  And so far, we've been pretty good on our side of the table, picking trends and things like that. Hopefully we can be good about predicting trends and things in the future. I think consolidation is going to be continuing to happen. And I think that the structure of how you raise capital and where it comes from and how your fund is structured and how your portfolio looks is going to change.

• 46:37Auren Hoffman?

  Great. All right, two personal questions we ask all of our guests. First one is, what is a conspiracy theory that you believe?

• 46:42Speaker 01

  That's pretty funny. I love that one, by the way. I'll tell you two. Here, I'll give you a bonus one. So I do think that people don't understand that your phone has a microphone and is listening to you constantly. Because Apple does have the feature on all the time to listen for when you say, hey Siri or whatever.

• 47:02Auren Hoffman?

  By the way, just because we said, hey Siri, right now, 20 people's phones right now who are listening to this, they're going to like totally malfunction and mess up.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  See, my phone just lit up with the Siri.

• 47:13Auren Hoffman?

  Totally.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  But if you download an application and it's by default, microphone's on, it's listening as well. So I do think that your phone is listening to more of what you're seeing on the application side. Maybe you've given permission to applications to listen to you and you didn't realize it.

• 47:28Auren Hoffman?

  Do you do anything differently? Are you putting your phone in a Faraday cage and stuff like that?

• 47:33Speaker 01

  I did go in and make sure on all my applications that I had the microphone off if I wanted the microphone off. I think that's something from a security perspective you should be doing. Because if you have the microphone on, you've consented me on, they can be listening to you. So I do believe that there is this conspiracy theory of your phone listening to you and serving you an ad of something you just said. So if I said, hey, I'm looking for a new pair of jeans and then they'll look at my phone and there's somehow there's a pair for a new pair of jeans.

• 47:56Auren Hoffman?

  That would actually be like a feature, not a bug to me, if that actually works.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  Since you understand the advertising market, you can tell me if my conspiracy theory is wrong or not. But I do believe your phone's listening to you and I do believe that you should take personal security actions to turn off the microphone.

• 48:11Auren Hoffman?

  That's a very good one. So do you have a second one?

• 48:13Speaker 01

  I got a second one.

• 48:14Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, amazing.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  I also think that the NSA through their Utah data center is collecting all of your email, all of your phone records, all of your conversations. Probably this thing that we're talking about right now because it's not encrypted and then storing them and going through them for national security. So I do believe that the government is storing browser history, shopping history, travel and tentereries, the whole digital trail.

• 48:36Auren Hoffman?

  And do you think they're effective? There's one thing to collect it, the one thing actually to like use it and run things on top of it. Do you think actually they're effective at it?

• 48:44Speaker 01

  So that's a good question. I don't know. I believe that it's being collected. How it's being used, there's probably a good set of protocols, procedures around that.

• 48:53Auren Hoffman?

  Certainly, there was all these things China was tapping Verizon phones and stuff like that. And I'm sure they were also on there tapping everything and their Huawei stuff is collecting as much stuff. They're all trying to Hoover all this stuff.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  That's 100% true. Otherwise, we wouldn't have things like TikTok divested. But yeah, I do believe that there's a lot more monitoring of our society than people might think.

• 49:14Auren Hoffman?

  Interesting. Our last question we ask all of our guests, what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

• 49:20Speaker 01

  I think a lot of advice is bad, but I think one thing that I've been told was like, hey, you should always marry your high school sweetheart. So I think that love advice, I think if you go in bad advice as it relates to like love and marriage.

• 49:32Auren Hoffman?

  You should marry your high school sweetheart is bad advice or good advice?

• 49:36Speaker 01

  I think that's bad advice.

• 49:38Auren Hoffman?

  I've never even heard people say that. Is that a common thing that people say?

• 49:41Speaker 01

  Oh, really? That's definitely a thing, and I've got a whole bunch of friends who've married. Maybe it's because I'm from Minnesota and everybody did marry their high school sweetheart.

• 49:48Auren Hoffman?

  It's funny, where I live in Northern Virginia, I know seven couples that married their high school sweetheart, and they're like all amazing couples. It's unbelievable.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  And they're still good?

• 49:59Auren Hoffman?

  They're still good 25 plus years later, and they're incredible couples. And you look at these people, you're like, wow. There's something about, at least in Northern Virginia, marrying your high school sweetheart is a great idea.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  So let me caveat that. I think that if you're still in a more rural area and you're not living in a city, and you've decided that, I'm from Minnesota, and if I would have stayed in Minnesota and I wanted to have my family in Minnesota, I never wanted to leave Minnesota, and I never wanted to do anything else except for stay there and be there and have a family and everything like that, then maybe marrying your high school sweetheart is a great idea. I think that if you go out into the world and live in different places and different cities and have educated different places and have different jobs, and if you're in more of the group of people that are here in San Francisco, I think marrying your high school sweetheart is not a good idea. And that is because people change over time, people evolve, and if you are from a more

• 50:52Speaker 01

  rural community, you end up living in, building your career in New York City, I think the probability of the person that you were with when you were in the rural community developing as you develop in New York City, I think that's a very low probability of the relationship.

• 51:07Auren Hoffman?

  Let me just stress this, because again, I got married later in life, but I've met all these people now who have met their sweethearts when they're 16 years old, or they met them earlier, but they started dating, and they went to prom together. And I look at them, and they seem like they have incredible relationships. And like, one really cool thing is they kind of grew up together. So they evolved together. Now, maybe you can evolve separately, and obviously that won't work out, because people do change.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  I think that's really hard. If you stay around the same area that you are in, I think it's a lot easier. I think that it's really hard to have two people coming from, maybe it's not a city or a big metropolis.

• 51:43Auren Hoffman?

  How old were you when you got married?

• 51:45Speaker 01

  29.

• 51:46Auren Hoffman?

  29, okay. So you're relatively young in this world, even though maybe in some worlds that's old, but you're relatively young to get married.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Compared to my peers that I was one of the last people to get married.

• 51:56Auren Hoffman?

  But nowadays in San Francisco, the average age is even older.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  Well, now people are getting married in their late 30s and it's fine. I do believe that especially if your career's evolved, if your education's evolved, if you've moved into larger cities and live more of a city sort of life, I think that the person that you're going to spend your life with that can relate to you and build a family that you also want to build and have that work, I think has to have an equivalent background. It's kind of oil and water in a way, I think.

• 52:23Auren Hoffman?

  Interesting.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  That's my opinion.

• 52:26Auren Hoffman?

  In some ways, I think there's a probability that people will start getting married a little bit younger. We might be in peak age of people getting married right now, especially in some of these cities where you could start to see a trend where people start getting married more in their 20s again, less in their 30s or even later in some cases that people are getting married now.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  But if you go to Japan, it's the reverse.

• 52:49Auren Hoffman?

  People are getting married even later, or they're not marrying at all.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  Or they're not getting married at all.

• 52:54Auren Hoffman?

  Though Japan is a weird place, so it used to be the lowest TFR in fertility rate in the world in the 90s. And now they have the same fertility rate as they did in the 90s. They haven't changed, so they're now double the fertility rate of South Korea, way higher than Italy, Spain, most of these European countries. So I love Japan, it's like an incredibly interesting and weird place.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  Japan's fantastic.

• 53:18Auren Hoffman?

  It's one of my favorite places in the whole world to go to. By the way, this has been awesome, but I love this last segment because I love talking about love. This has been amazing. Thank you, Hans Wildens, for joining us on World of DAS. By the way, I follow you at Hans Wildens on X. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage with you there. We've been friends for a long time and I knew this would be awesome and this was super fun. So thank you again for being on World of DAS.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  Thank you, Auren, I appreciate it.

• 53:45Auren Hoffman?

  Thanks for listening. If you haven't already done so, please subscribe to World of DAS wherever you consume your podcasts, YouTube, Apple, Spotify and more. And please help us get discovered by leaving a review and check out worldofdas.com. That's worldofdas, D-A-A-S, dot com. And of course, connect with me on Twitter, at Auren, that's A-U-R-E-N. Would absolutely love to hear from you.