MechanismAudio · 27:14 — 31:40
Venture capitalists are now selling into secondaries as a way to generate DPI for LPs, but this creates complicated personality dynamics because private market founders react negatively to selling, unlike public markets where selling is anonymous.
Brad Gerstner explains that VCs are now actively selling secondary positions to return capital to LPs, but this requires a difficult conversation with the founder who always dislikes it. In public markets, selling is anonymous until the 13F filing, whereas in private markets every sale is a personal negotiation with the CEO who may resent it. ✦ AI generated
Brad Gerstner · All-In Podcast · 2026-06-07 · original ↗
plays this moment only · 27:14 — 31:40
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“Do you view this as exit liquidity for you? Like, would you shape your portfolio and returns and increasingly say, you know what? I don't know when this guy's going to go public. Let me just pump the stuff out.”
We are selling into this. 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.
verbatim transcript · starts at 27:14
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