Venture capitalists are increasingly selling into secondary markets to generate DPI for LPs, representing a structural shift where VCs must think about the sell decision — not just the buy — especially for trillion-dollar private companies like Databricks.

Brad Gerstner explains that his LPs are asking him to sell slices of positions at 4-5x returns to generate DPI, and that the private-market sell decision is more complicated than public markets because it requires direct founder conversations that create friction. ✦ AI generated

Brad Gerstner · All-In Podcast · 2026-06-07 · original ↗

We are selling into this. You're selling into this. Right? So I have LPs in this room who say, listen, we invested in your VC5 or VC6 seven or eight years ago. If you can go sell a slice of that at 4 or 5X and we get DPI and it's priced really high, then go sell some of it. And we often don't talk about this in Ventureland. Half of what we do is in the public markets. Gavin and I get up every morning and we think to ourselves, should we buy today or should we sell today? Venture capitalists don't think about the sell part. They think about the buy part. So if we're going to stay private for longer and we're going to have trillion dollar private companies and Databricks at $200 billion. You've got to think about is today a day we should be selling some and returning it to our investors.

verbatim transcript · starts at 16:16