Pod Insights How I Invest with David Weisburd E376: The $3 Trillion Liquidity Problem in Venture Capital About this episode What if the biggest opportunity in venture today isn’t funding new companies—but solving the liquidity crisis created by companies staying private for 20 years?
In this episode, I sit down with Jared Carmel, Founder and Managing Partner of Manhattan Venture Partners, to discuss how venture secondaries evolved from a gray market into critical infrastructure for private capital markets. Jared explains why nearly $3 trillion is now trapped in aging venture funds, how DPI became the defining metric for LPs, and why secondary liquidity is now essential for founders, employees, and venture firms alike. We also explore continuation vehicles, cap table management, institutionalization of the secondary market, and why trust compounds faster than capital in private investing.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 David Weisburd? Jared, you're the founder and managing partners of Manhattan Venture Partners, which has roughly $3 billion in AUM. And last time when we were chatting, you said that there's $3 trillion, with a T, locked up in venture. What did you mean by that?
0:15 Speaker 01 There's roughly $2.7 trillion of capital that's locked up in venture funds past their 10-year life. So that means that distributions back to LPs have been relatively negative for the last several years. So meaning the industry is not returning cash, which in part is why I have a business. And I think the reason's simple. There's so much private capital chasing these companies that they don't need to go public. And staying private gives these companies room to iterate without the noise of a quarterly earnings report. So they stay private. And if you look at some of the most recent IPOs, whether that was Klarna back in, I think it was Q3, they were a 20-year-old company. Think about that for a second, two decades.
0:56 Speaker 01 SpaceX, which is supposed to go out over the summer, that's a 24-year-old business, right? Those aren't outliers. To me, what I'm seeing is that there's a new shape in venture. And so the way we see it is that companies are now on this 20-year journey, but funds are positioned for 10 years, which I think is, you know, why we have an active secondaries market.
1:18 David Weisburd? Perhaps this is a dumb question, but why are these companies staying private for so long? 20 years seems like an egregious amount of time to stay private.
1:26 Speaker 01 They stay private because they can, right? That's, I know that sounds like funny, and I'll explain that. I think the private markets have become the default and the public markets have become the exception because a company has enough capital privately that they can iterate on their business, they could pivot on their business, and they could build without having to deal with the public market noise that sort of destroys agility. And I don't think it's a bug. I think it's really the feature. A really good example is an investment that I'm not in called Caruso Energy, right? They pivoted on their business model a little bit. And in the private markets, they got a higher valuation on the back of it. Now, if they were a public company, I would imagine that an active
2:10 Speaker 01 Activist investor would show up, maybe the share price tanks and you're sort of fighting for your life instead of building. Companies don't need to go public to fund their growth. So ultimately, they don't, right? Distributions go negatives, funds hit their 10-year mark with no DPI. And to me, I think that's the real crisis. The secondary market, you know, broadly has been around for 30 years. But the evolution of secondary directs, now I don't think is a flash in the pan. I think it's the infrastructure that ultimately is going to let companies stay private as long as they need.
2:41 David Weisburd? So has the vibe shifted with LPs when it comes to DPI?
2:47 Speaker 01 Absolutely. The shift is simple. IRR does not pay the bills, DPI does. The power law in venture means that many GPs hold these massively overweight positions in late-stage companies. And those companies no longer exit on schedule. So LPs, they get stuck. Funds get hit 12, 13, or 14 years when they really expected to exit in 10 years. So that velocity of money that used to be in venture, it starts to collapse. So this is a true story. I'm flying out to Mexico City a year ago. And I'm online and in front of me, I bumped into one of our larger families that we work with. And I was a little insulted that Julio didn't come visit us when he was in New York.
3:32 Speaker 01 And he said, listen, I was actually on a tour of all the private equity funds that we're invested in. He goes, for almost 20 years, we've been laddered in every one of these flagship funds. The longest one, he was in for 18 years. So if you think about that for a second, they expect in half of that. And so to me, that conversation changed so much for me. Because what I realized is whether you're a GP in venture or you're a GP in private equity, it's kind of easy to get into the business. But how do you get out? And to me, that became the real question that I think about as, you know, we invest in many of the companies that we invest in.
4:07 David Weisburd? And shows itself in the numbers. I had the CEO of Allocator Training Institute, Alex Ambrose. They've tracked this data for many years. So the original David Swensen model, who started this, the Yale Endowment model. They modeled a 24% yearly DPI on private assets. 2024 is 9%, 2025 is again 9%. So you had almost two and a half times less DPI. And that just breaks the entire model. There's so many downstream consequences to not getting DPI. You mentioned one of these. You have to be more selective where you re-up. You have to go back to your investment committee and explain why you don't have liquidity and why you did not model the correct outcomes.
4:51 David Weisburd? There's so many downstream consequences that are underappreciated when you're in the GPC. So you mentioned you started the business 12 years ago. We met probably in the first year that you started MVP.
5:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
5:03 David Weisburd? And at that point, the secondary market was a gray market, to put it nicely. It was somewhere between a gray and a black market. And over time, it's institutionalized more and more. What's been behind that?
5:16 Speaker 01 Companies, as you know, started to stay private longer and the actual sheer magnitude of them started to get bigger. Look, I think one of the issues that bubbled up during those years was everybody at the time was trying to democratize this space. So it was like, let's open up the floodgates to retail. And by opening up the floodgates to retail, they're like, this is progress. But ultimately, today especially, I think 92% of all the secondary transactions are actually institutional. 8% are really retail. And I heard that when I was at an event with Tom Callahan from the NASDAQ private market. And because if you look at their data, they're doing so much more volume than sort of everybody else, and that's because they're running tender off.
6:01 Speaker 01 So all of these things are happening behind closed doors. But what's really funny is that 8% retail is what the, where all the published data seems to be coming from. So there's also a mismatch in sort of valuation and pricing. And I think the ratio tells you everything about how this market really works. So again, the total addressable market to me is too big for retail alone. When we started talking about this years ago and we got to know each other, it was very retail central. And the need to institutionalize capital to create the liquidity at scale that this market demands, nobody was really doing at that time. Listen, I think retail should participate. I think it's, I think it's important that they get access to this. And look, frankly,
6:44 Speaker 01 if you're allowed to go to Atlantic City in Las Vegas and bet it all on black at the roulette table, you should be allowed to invest in venture. But again, that's probably a conversation for a whole other podcast. But I think institutional dominance is what's going to make this market more efficient. The first time I ever saw institutional presence was when Tiger Global showed up and they started to accumulate companies like LinkedIn and then later on with Spotify. And they were doing it in the way that a public market investor would accumulate stocks that they understood better than the market, the Warren Buffett method. That was the moment that I realized, okay, this isn't really a gray market. This is a very real market. This is an institutional market. But at that time, most of my now peers were
7:27 Speaker 01 trying to democratize it. And we realized that somebody needed to step in and institutionalize it. And today, companies are raising billion dollar rounds almost every single day. But the reality is, there's a very small subset of, let's call it sophisticated investors who truly understand how to move that capital, especially secondary capital, at scale.
7:47 David Weisburd? I have a contrarian take on this. And because of my vantage point, I have having hundreds of these conversations with, with different players in the ecosystem. There's several headwinds against retail participating. One is, and this is public information, the CFOs of the most traded secondary names like OpenAI, AI and Anthropic are literally going out on X and saying, if you buy via unauthorized vehicles, we will not honor those transactions. On top of that, you have what's become a meme of itself, these 2 and 20 on 2 and 20 and 2 and 20, these, these triple layered SVVs into companies like SpaceX, like Anthropic, like OpenAI, just in full disclosure, investor in SpaceX and Anthropic, not through any
8:32 David Weisburd? of these vehicles. And at some point, you're going to have a reckoning. And I think not only will people be severely disappointed by their actual returns, I actually think some people will go to jail. And by the way, when I say people are, will go to jail, I'm talking about rehypothecation of shares. Some people probably double, triple, quadruple sold their shares.
8:56 David Weisburd? And the pretty obvious second order effect, if you believe that this will happen, I think it's hard to argue that some part of these trades will not blow up in people's faces, is that there's going to be now a return back to the institutional bid. Why? Two reasons. One is investors are no longer going to trust these SPV vehicles as they shouldn't blindly. They should always do your diligence. You always want to read the LPAs. You always want to make sure that whoever's selling you this exposure has a very good reputation, has a verifiable track record, all those things. But two, and perhaps much more importantly, is that of all the problems the CFO of OpenAI or Anthropic or SpaceX is dealing with, this is the very last problem on planet Earth
9:41 David Weisburd? that they want to be dealing with, which is somebody's grandma, let's say that she happens to have $2 million in net worth and she's an accredited investor. Good for her, but somebody's grandma is emailing the CFO saying, I lost my life savings investing to SpaceX. And this is not going to end well. That being said, I do think this is going to be another buying opportunity for the institutional bid.
10:04 Speaker 01 I think that's an interesting hypothesis. And the last 72 hours has been pretty wild. And everything that we're able to sort of read online about what especially Anthropic is saying, or historically what Anduril has been very vocal about, I think is real. The only problem I have with some of it is that if you look back at the FTX transactions that occurred around Anthropic, so many of those companies, because it's all public, were LLCs. They knew it at the time. I think at some point in time, a lawyer probably woke up and said to them, hey, I don't think you guys know how many actual investors you have sitting on your cap stack because there's a look through to those LLCs.
10:47 Speaker 01 I've started to see over the last six months, we're this hub on the wheel. So often we get somebody who thinks they have something and the new thing is this is an L1 or an L2 or an L3, meaning layer one, a layer two, or layer three. First off, I hate it. Second off, it's pretty wild that we're there. To your point, I think that there's probably a method that where retail can get it. And it's probably through the likes of mutual funds, like 40 act funds, right? Where you have real managers like the Liberty Fund, which used to be the Shares Post 100 Fund. Big mutual fund blessed by the companies, direct to cap table. Like that's where retail should go. Companies are going to be a bit more aggressive about who's on their cap table.
11:31 Speaker 01 I can tell you from being an investor in XAI and their Series B, they asked who our LPs were. They weren't the last. Since then, I've had at least two other companies ask for a list of who our LPs are. And so I think that to you, to your point, there's going to be a bit of a new normal, right? Where they're going to be a little bit stricter on, you know, who's on the other side of the transaction. Look, I see my relationships with the companies as a partnership. So, you know, trust is probably the most important thing when it comes to those relationships.
12:01 David Weisburd? Expert calls have always been one of the most powerful ways to build conviction. But today, investors are asked to cover more companies, move faster and do it with leaner teams. With AlphaSense AI-led expert calls, their TGS call service team sources experts based on your research criteria and lets the AI interviewer get to work. The magic is in the AI interviewer, purpose-built and knowledgeable-based information to conduct high-quality, context-rich conversations on your behalf, acting as a trusted extension of your team. Then they take it one step further. Your call transcripts flow natively into your AlphaSense experience and become queryable, searchable and comparable. So your primary insights plug directly into earnings prep, digital work streams and pitch books with zero tool switching.
12:44 David Weisburd? And with AlphaSense expert call services, the AI-led expert calls are just one option because we know the importance of a hybrid expert research approach. AI for coverage and efficiency, humans for complexity and conviction. It's the institutional edge that scales research without scaling headcount. For hedge funds, that means validating thesis assumptions across dozens of experts before earnings instead of a handful. For private equity, it means faster pre-IOI scans and deeper commercial diligence. For investment banks and asset managers, it means pulling real operator perspectives straight into models and sector positioning without disconnected tools or manual handoffs.
13:22 David Weisburd? All of it lives inside the AlphaSense platform, trusted by 75% of the world's top hedge funds alongside filings, broker research, news, and more than 240,000 expert call transcripts, turning raw conversations into comparable, auditable insight. Take advantage of AlphaSense AI-led expert calls now. The first to see wins, the rest follow. Learn more at alphasense.com/HowIInvest. If you had to guess, what do you think they were trying to ascertain there?
13:51 Speaker 01 There's still cap table limitations, especially when it comes to accredited investors, right? Not to qualified investors. And so if there is a look through, which I know there is,
14:02 Speaker 01 they don't know how many accredited they have. And if you hit a certain number, then I think you're forced to start to either report like a public company or you're forced into the public markets.
14:15 David Weisburd? Today, you focus on the Series B to Series E part of the market.
14:19 Speaker 01 Sure.
14:20 David Weisburd? What's your right to win? How do you compete against? How do you compete in one of the most competitive parts of the entire capital markets?
14:27 Speaker 01 12 years, it's four different business lines and it's one signal engine. And it's the value proposition that I'm able to provide to the company. So, look, I'm not Andreessen Horowitz, I'm not Sequoia. I cannot walk into you as a founder of a company and tell you how I'm going to help you build and scale and how I have these most amazing connections ever so that you can become the next unicorn or decacorn. I'm not TRO, I'm not Fidelity, right? I can't help you sort of pre or post IPO like companies like that can do. But what I can offer you is the ability to be a pressure relief valve on your cap stack. I can keep you private as long as you need.
15:10 Speaker 01 And ultimately, so you don't end up in the hands of potentially those SPVs that were being called out. Think about it this way, I land in your Series C, you just, somebody bubbles up on your cap stack. It could be an early investor, it could be your CFO who's moved on. And what you end up doing is you introduce them to us and we can be that pressure relief. It goes into the hands of a friend. That is one of the many value propositions I think that we provide. And for, you know, to be selfish here, right?
15:41 Speaker 01 I think every piece of my business, especially on the LP side, I think really feeds into each other, right? So I have four parts of my business. We have research, which you could go find on Bloomberg terminals. There's 15,000 subscribers who have come to our website organically. It kind of blows my mind. When we publish a report on, I don't know, XYZ company, and it goes out into the world, we see buyers, we see sellers, they start to sit. I've been doing this since the early days of Facebook. We were in Facebook, we were in Twitter, we were in Palantir, Spotify, Alibaba, and the people that I helped preserve their net worth in those days, today they're VCs, today they're founders. And that trust compounds over time. We're going to have new entrants into
16:24 Speaker 01 this market, right? But they cannot sort of replicate the receipts that I think that we have.
16:32 David Weisburd? Have you thought about CVs? And what are your thoughts on CVs and venture?
16:36 Speaker 01 So I think the best and the largest venture funds have the ability to create their continuation vehicles. So all the tier ones that you're talking about, right? Those top potentially decile performers. I think it's a lot harder for newer and smaller VCs. Look, I mean, we utilized it ourselves. So in my MVP All-Star Fund III, right? We had SpaceX was the last piece of that portfolio. We didn't force a choice. What we did was we gave our LPs an option. Hold it and ride it to the IPO, or sell it to a new LP with a different timeline to liquidity. Some wanted the home runs, others wanted cash. I think both are legitimate, and we engineered a way to solve for
17:21 Speaker 01 both. I think that what you're going to see is you're going to see some traditional VCs submit it to the company for transfer. I think other times they're going to create continuation vehicles. It really depends on the depth and the breadth of the organization.
17:37 David Weisburd? I'm very bullish on continuation vehicles in venture capital. For one, it literally solves a DPI problem. Why? Because a continuation vehicle is classified as a secondary, which very importantly means that the VC is able to market as DPI for the next fundraise. And venture capitalists, just like any asset manager in the world, are in these continuous Fundraising cycle, so having these marks is extremely valuable. Two is it's difficult for LPs to have the cognitive dissonance in that I think it's terrible that you're doing this, but also I don't want to roll my equity into the CVs. And almost every single CV that I've ever seen, that I've ever heard of allows the LPs
18:19 David Weisburd? to recommit to the next vehicle and oftentimes with lower fees. So sometimes it goes from a 2 and 20 to a lower fee. Many of these CVs, not in terms of AUM, not in terms of number, but many of the highest quality CVs have very good alignment with the GPs and that oftentimes they're rolling their carry, they're recommitting a GP commit in order to make it marketable if they're trying to bring in new LPs. That being said, there's one very big friction on CVs is that they are also extremely problematic if you're venture capital exempt, because again, they're secondary, they're a fund of one, they basically negate your entire venture capital exemption.
19:00 David Weisburd? So that, I think, has been the big, the big friction on CVs. Everything else points to many CVs happening in the future outside of this caveat. And I think some very smart, large asset managers are starting to partner with GPs on these CV opportunities in order to solve around these exemption issues as well. But at a high level, if you take away the venture capital exemption, there's so many reasons to do it and very few reasons not to do it.
19:30 Speaker 01 I don't have these statistics. I wonder how many venture funds at this point have become RIAs instead of these exempt reporting advisors or these exempt.
19:38 David Weisburd? I have the answer for you, somewhat tongue in cheek, but 75%. Why? Because 75% by AUM, that's my tongue in cheek answer. It's a, it's an estimate. Why? Because 75% of firms raised of capital raised in the last year were
19:54 Speaker 01 Over 100.
19:56 David Weisburd? Were basically top, top five. If you think about 75% of all of VC is the top 10 firms, almost all of them are RIAs at this point. From a firm standpoint, I think it's still small. I think it's still probably less than 10% of funds are RIAs. And by the way, the quantity of the number of firms is as important as the AUM because it's decision makers and people around the tables on deals.
20:22 Speaker 01 Right.
20:22 David Weisburd? So if there's only one person that may be interested in a company in a CV, even if that person has $100 billion, it's a different dynamic than having 100 people have a billion dollars. So I think both quantity of funds as well as AUM of funds are both important metrics.
20:39 Speaker 01 So if I have this right, you're saying that it's a small number of VCs, but 75% of the dollars.
20:49 David Weisburd? When we originally met in 2014, you'd just gotten started. You've now grown the firm to nearly $3 billion in AUM.
20:58 David Weisburd? What has surprised you the most about building an asset management firm?
21:03 Speaker 01 It goes back to what I was saying before. I think the answer is trust, right? The most surprising part of going from sort of zero to, I think it's 2.8 billion, is the trust, and that comes from both sides, right? So the trust our LPs put in us and the trust that the companies we serve also put in us, right? So when I was launching on my first fund, I had an investor who made a lot of money with us in sort of one-off opportunities when we started off as this fundless sponsor. So I flew to Spain, I met him in his office. I looked at him and I said, look, this first fund is the most important thing that we're doing. And he looked back at me directly in my eyes and he said something like, I'll give you a million dollars, kid. And that's the LP side of trust, right? And that's how the firm got built.
21:46 Speaker 01 On the company side, that trust is also really important. Hawkeye 360, they did their round recently, right? We invested in their Series D1 in 2023. They're an RF satellite intelligence business. I'm a true believer in John Sarafini, who's running that organization. We landed in that primary and over time, John introduced us to secondary, which let us bring our cost basis down for our LPs. But we also added real value because it was a need that he wanted for his cap stack, which is why we had the opportunity to invest. Obviously, we had some real value beyond capital. We introduced him to Admiral Mike Gilde, who ended up joining his board. And then three and a half years later, Hawkeye is now a public company. Now, again, that's not SpaceX, that's not Anthrope.
22:32 Speaker 01 That's not a secondary markets darling, but it's a tier one name that became a tier one outcome because of trust on both sides. And so, look, you know, AUM is fine, right? But again, I try to measure our business from by DPI. And my first three funds for those vintages were top decile performers, you know, based on our DPI. But our LPs and our companies, they measure us by trust and they and that trust to me, kind of goes a long way. And, you know, it's so cliche. I'm going to borrow a concept from Warren Buffett. You know, it took us 12 years to build a reputation and it would just take us five, five minutes to ruin it. And truthfully, that trust is what keeps me up at night.
23:14 David Weisburd? You mentioned it. Trust is such a cliche term. And I used to be, I used to kind of discount it as corporate speak and in a kind of like every VC says they're partnership oriented and value add, all these, all these buzzwords. But then I found my own behavior in 2019, when I was choosing a crypto fund. I was surprised by my own behavior in that I, I wasn't attracted or going for the fund that had the best returns. I was going towards the partner that I trusted the most. And I'm like, what? That, that was very interesting to see my own behavior because I thought I would be more value maximizing than trust oriented. And then as a GP, when I think about who I first call on LPs, on opportunities,
23:55 David Weisburd? it's again, not the biggest funds and it's not even the best terms. It's who do I trust the most?
24:01 Speaker 01 Yes.
24:01 David Weisburd? As both of us know, a lot of these deals require a lot of discretion. There's confidential information. There's process orientation. There's needing to set expectations with a company. There's so many things that are more important than the dollars and cents. It's something that is counterintuitive until you're really in the capital markets, building relationships and doing business with people. And I think when people say building relationships, it's also such a soft thing to say. It really means I dealt with somebody, we both had power at different parts of the relationship and neither of us decided to exercise that power in a way that hurt the other party.
24:43 David Weisburd? And unfortunately, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, but in the finance world and asset management world, there's so much money at stake. Frankly, the filtering to get into this industry through investment banking and some of these other places oftentimes are zero sum to start your career. That actually, it is quite rare that you find a counterparty that you could trust that doesn't squeeze you when they have leverage. Coming back around to this concept of trust, it's such a simple, such a cliche term, but it really is that valuable and it does compound in ways. And just to give you an example on that, I had Rahul Mukdal on the podcast a couple of times. Rahul's in many ways is probably the top private fundraiser of all time.
25:26 David Weisburd? He's raised over $100 billion and not for the largest funds in the world, but some of the small and medium sized fund. And one of the things he talked about on the podcast is he had a check from Tamasik. And I think it was like a single digit million dollar check. It was just in one of their fund of funds. And then he started another, another fund. They came in with, I believe it was a $50 million. Point is building a relationship. So many people are so eager and so egotistical not to take that small check from a big party. If you could build a, in your case, $3 billion, but a $10 billion, $100 billion asset management firm over time by doing right with small checks with very important parties.
26:11 David Weisburd? And I think that's a highly underappreciated aspect as well.
26:15 Speaker 01 That person I was telling you about out of Spain introduced us to his entire network. He has been a good friend. He has never squeezed us too hard. It's always been that quid pro quo. I think the other part of trust comes with how do you handle each other when there is friction? Because you're talking, like you said, we were talking about money. Inevitably, there's going to be friction. Deal doesn't quite work out. Shares don't land in the account in a timeline that was expected, right? And ultimately, it's how do you guys end up getting to the other side of it? I will say, I learned from one of my partners, who you met before, Brad Fishman. Like he's one of the most commercial people I know. When you talk about Tamasik and you know, that relationship, that's how Brad has handled some of our biggest relationships.
27:00 Speaker 01 Where I was just like, ah, what are we doing? Let's, let's move on. He had it. He's had a 10 year view with them. And all of a sudden, you know, as you know, our lives were changing and we were growing. All of a sudden they've become much bigger pieces of our business. And to be honest with you, I probably would have been much more impatient. But he stayed on top of it. And 10 years later, you'd be shocked at some of the sovereigns who, uh, who like to work with us.
27:26 David Weisburd? The opposite of that, by the way, does not work, which is taking large checks from people with, with not large balance. A lot of people are tempted to do that. This is a common failure mode, as well as taking small checks from people where that money actually means a lot to their lifestyle. Probably the number one worst thing you could possibly do. It's that, it's that meme. You always regret the 25 K check that you take in.
27:47 Speaker 01 So I think actually when we met, I started a, um, a fintech called Citizen DC. Do you remember that? Yeah. So I think that's when we first met and that's when I realized, you know, $25,000 checks are going to sue you a lot quicker than your million dollar check when it doesn't hurt as much for them. And so that was part of the reason why when we were contemplating democratize versus institutionalize this asset class. Not only did we see where the pup was going as far as the institutional side of things, but ultimately, we recognized that the, the, I always felt like the risk on sort of the retail side or the smaller investor side of this business could be significantly greater than the risk on the institutional side.
28:33 David Weisburd? What does MVP look like in five to 10 years?
28:37 Speaker 01 It's a good question. If you, in my idealistic half, you know, glass full sort of attitude that I, that I think I have. I think within 10 years, I think we're an institutional standard for the entire secondary market. From our land and expand from primary into direct secondary, potentially eventually layer in LP secondary, structured liquidity. Today I have those four business lines. Maybe tomorrow we add LP secondary as the fifth. The market is telling me what we need, right? We just build around it. I think my fun five. Has been this interesting proof point. I sized my funds based on hindsight.
29:18 Speaker 01 We're deploying, we're deploying it very cleanly. There's been no style drift. And what I can tell you from that deployment, if I move the decimal point over to the right on every investment that we made, I would have had zero style drift. So although that was a $300 million fund, could I have done it as a $3 billion fund? I think where the size of the market is today, I think the answer is probably yes. And I think I would have placed every dollar in that same discipline. I have two partners. I broke my crystal ball a long time ago. It's hard to predict the future. But what I can tell you is I think we're sitting here and I think you probably agree the market is writing the story right in front of our eyes. And look, we're just going to keep showing up.
29:58 David Weisburd? If you could go back to 2014, as I mentioned, we just met at that point. If you could give yourself one timeless piece of advice, what would that be?
30:11 Speaker 01 It's do less, win more. Those four words, right? In our early days, me and my two partners, we were Swiss Army knives. Like I remember meeting you, the whole team showed up, all three of us. So by the way, we're 30 odd people deep now. So we did everything. The three of us did everything we needed to do and it actually cost us. It didn't cost us relationships. It didn't cost us reputation. But a few times it cost us real capital, right? It was a few small costly mistakes that I look back on and I realized if I just hired a specialist for that lane instead of trying to be everything, we would have been a lot further along, a lot faster. You know, I'd probably walk up to the 2014 me and say, listen, stop being a generalist. Hire and stay in your lane. You don't know everything.
30:57 Speaker 01 But you know, young men do think they know everything. But the other side of it is I'll tell you what I really got right.
31:05 Speaker 01 It's who I built this with and I'd be remiss not to mention them. Eric Brockfeld has been the implementer to my vision, right? He's the reason that this ship has been driving straight for all of these years. Brad, as I suggested, not only is he as commercial as anyone I've ever worked with, but he's kept me grounded. He's deeply relationship oriented. I truly, and I'm not just saying this because you know, this is going to be heard by other people. I truly have some of the best partners on the planet and I don't think everyone gets that. So the advice is do less, but only if you could work with partners who could do more. Right? And that's the part I sort of lucked into. Look, now that I'm on the wrong side of 40, I could finally talk about the errors of a young man who's trying to figure something out.
31:49 Speaker 01 If I could walk up to the 20, 14 year old me, again, it's four words, do less, win more.
31:55 David Weisburd? I'm curious, you obviously have great partners, but as you mentioned, you've scaled up to 30 people. You've had to bring in people, these specialists. What's the modus operandi? Let's say tomorrow you wanted to start an LP secondary business, dedicated business. How would you build out that business and what degree of freedom would you give to that person? And don't say a hundred percent.
32:20 Speaker 01 It's not a hundred percent, but I've learned having a bit of a lazy management style with really, with really smart and motivated people is one of the best ways to continue that motivation. Right? In our, you know, again, I think we've done everything. We've worn every hat from, you know, CEO to chief bottle washer around here. And the reality of the situation is when I let sort of teams work and have a regular cadence with them, but not sort of helicopter them, ultimately that's when they do the best, especially in the financial world, whether that's Wall Street or Silicon Valley or anywhere in between.
33:03 Speaker 01 You often get very motivated people anyway, right? They're, they're motivated by a few things. They're motivated by the win. They're motivated by money. They're motivated by, you know, the idea of however they define success. And the truth of the matter is, In these scenarios, what I have found is if I allowed them to go do their job away from me, they do it very well. Long term, you know, I would take a note from my partner, Eric, who I find him at this point in his career to be very professorial, right? Show up, put it on his desk, he's going to look it over, he'll spend some time, you know, sort of redlining it for you and with you, but instead of throwing it back at you,
33:45 Speaker 01 he sits down and he educates. Again, wrong side of 40 at this point, and as you know, time does fly. So it's one of those things where, you know, if I can impart some of my knowledge onto somebody else that works here, you start to create that sort of ladder internally, where you are creating some of the best and brightest from the bottom up. And I will say, with that being said, although this might be the opposite of where we started, I have at least three folks who started with me 11 years ago as interns that are principals at my organization today. We have almost no attrition.
34:17 David Weisburd? You mentioned something really underrated in finance. You have such a self-selection of people, some of the most ambitious people in the world. It's not oftentimes about motivating those people. It's about making sure that their motivations are right to start with. In other words, that they're not just optimizing on the outcome. It's not like going out and selling hot dogs across the stadium. It's really about getting the people that are going to preserve your brand and then finding ways to motivate. And it's a different way of managing than you would manage in other industries.
34:50 Speaker 01 I think you're right, although I haven't managed in many other industries. I think that ultimately what we have seen is that if you get a cowboy, right, inside or a cowgirl, to be fair, it could be either. Ultimately, it's about reputational risk and then we're doing a full circle back to trust. So if I can't trust you to present MVP, if your motivation is just the money, it turns out that, you know, those motivations end up putting us off sides. And I've also found in some ways that some of the best hires are former athletes. It doesn't have to be collegiate, right? But people who like the win, right? They're almost, in a weird way, they're broken. They just want to win. It's not about the money. It's about the like feeling of the success, not necessarily seeing all the zeros at the end
35:35 Speaker 01 of the bank account.
35:38 David Weisburd? My podcast is secretly a therapy session for me and my problems. So perhaps you can give me some advice. One of the things I have trouble with is letting go of certain tasks. Maybe it's ego, but I feel like I could always do it a little bit better than somebody. How do you deal with that?
35:56 Speaker 01 So this is a conversation that we have regularly. Right? So it no, really. I mean, a few years ago, I started to do it because I was overwhelmed. I have three children at home. Believe it or not, my oldest is 17. I have a 14 year old and then I have a nine year old. So even to this day, teaching one how to drive, playing lacrosse with the other one and playing Barbie dolls with the third. My life has gotten so busy that I don't have a choice. My partner, Eric, is the one who I have to sit down with. By the way, amazing. The person I have to sit down with all the time and be like, you don't want to be 80% good at everything, even though you could do it faster than everybody else. And you might think you're better. Just hand it off, let them do their job, let somebody else do it. I got to tell you, it's really, really hard.
36:39 Speaker 01 But if you're going to start to hire and build and scale, turn over quickly. If they're not working today, they're not going to work for the future. I have been very lucky and I have found amazing folks who want to be here. They're the right person in their seat. They want to be in that seat. And it turns out that once they understand their business, they do it better than anybody else and better than I could do it. So be selective. If they're not working out, move on, go on to the next person. And eventually you will find somebody who loves you.
37:11 David Weisburd? Jared, it's been great to know you for all this time and to compound our relationship. Thanks so much for jumping on the podcast.
37:18 Speaker 01 Thanks for having me. Great to see you. Loved it and congratulations on all the success.
37:23 David Weisburd? Thank you.
Previous E375: Why Tax Alpha Could Matter More Than Investment Returns Next E377: Midas List VC: Why Most VCs Miss the Biggest Companies Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated