Private markets have quietly swallowed the exit: secondaries now clear 31% of late-stage venture, and the public market is about to feel it

On 8 June 2026, three of the more plugged-in voices in US private markets — Altimeter's Brad Gerstner, Atreides founder Gavin Baker, and Forge's Kelly Rodriguez — sat down on the allin podcast to do something the venture industry has been quietly avoiding: state, on the record, that the exit has changed. Not "is changing." Changed. According to figures Gerstner walked through on a deck at the top of the segment, venture secondaries are now trading at roughly twice the transaction volume of the 2021 peak. Secondaries into SpaceX, Anduril, and Anthropic alone represented 31% of all primary venture activity in 2025. The implication is uncomfortable for anyone still modelling a 2010s-style venture pipeline: the IPO is no longer the off-ramp, the M&A is no longer the safety net, and the LP base that funded the last cycle is increasingly getting its distributions through a market most public investors have never seen.

The structural shift is real, and it is bigger than the panel's promotional sheen suggests. Private secondaries have gone from trading at roughly 80 cents on the dollar against the last primary round — a discount, the traditional signal of a tired market — to clearing at a 106% premium. Late-stage private marks are now above public comps. That is a regime change. It means that for the first time in the asset class's modern history, the bid-ask has tilted decisively toward the seller, and that the marginal allocator is no longer the primary fund but a secondary buyer willing to pay full price and then some.

The price has flipped, and the playbook with it

For most of the past decade, the venture convention held that private rounds price at a step-up, then mark up on the next round, then either IPO at a multiple or get written down. Secondaries existed as a discount market for tired LPs and a small arbitrage for specialists. On the panel, Gerstner walked through the inversion: a buyer of SpaceX, Anduril, or Anthropic on the secondary market in 2025 is paying above the last primary round. "Secondaries are now at record volume," he said, "roughly 2x the 2021 peak in transaction value." That math, if accurate, places the secondary market on its own as a multi-hundred-billion-dollar clearing mechanism — one that did not exist at this scale a decade ago.

Kelly Rodriguez, whose firm Forge now sits inside Schwab's brokerage complex, framed the buyer side. Forge's pre-Schwab platform had roughly 3 million investors. Schwab's retail base, she said, is 46 million investors with $12 trillion in platform assets. The acquisition effectively plugged Forge's private-market plumbing into the largest self-directed brokerage in the United States. A retail investor with a Schwab account is now one or two clicks from a tender offer into SpaceX — at the IPO price, Rodriguez's pitch goes, not at a venture-fund markup. Sixty companies, SpaceX among them, are already accessible through interval and closed-end fund products with $500 minimums.

That distribution is the legitimisation story. It is also the froth story.

The froth is on the wrapper

Gerstner flagged what he called the most reliable sentiment indicator of any cycle: the wrapper. On the day of the SpaceX IPO, he said, 14 levered ETFs launched against the stock. The implied SpaceX valuation circulating among underwriters sits at $1.75 trillion. A leveraged product on a single-name private-turned-public rocket company, on day one, is the kind of invention that has historically marked the late innings of a thematic cycle. "CMGI had no revenue and the stock went from $2 to $2,000 over the course of six months," Baker said, citing the 1999-to-2001 episode as his reference point. "They bought Foxboro Stadium. They're on the cover of Time magazine and they're out of business two years later." The panel's reading: the underlying businesses may be real, but the wrapper products around them are not pricing risk; they are pricing narrative.

The same dynamic applies to the SPV-and-secondary-on-SpaceX trade. Specialist vehicles marketed to family offices and high-net-worth individuals carry, by Baker's account, 10% loads and double carry — the underlying security may be the same SpaceX share, but the path to it costs the buyer twice. The panel's view is that these structures are where the next round of investor pain will concentrate, even if the underlying private businesses compound.

The sycophancy problem

The most pointed critique of the structural shift came from Baker, and it was not about price. It was about governance. "I don't think there is actually a good reason to stay private longer," he said. Founders do it, he argued, to avoid the microscope — quarterly earnings calls, sell-side analysts, public short sellers, the daily discipline of a stock tape. But the result is what Baker called a sycophantic information environment. "When you're the CEO of a private company, you are the most special flower to all of your investors," he said, "because they need access to the next round." The dynamic inverts the disciplining function public markets are supposed to perform.

Baker cited a specific historical example: a Facebook internal debate in 2010 over HTML5 versus native apps. He argued, in the room, for native; another executive argued for HTML5. Mark Zuckerberg later said publicly that had Facebook been public, the HTML5-versus-native debate would have been resolved correctly through pressure-testing from public investors, and that the year of delay "made all the difference." Baker's broader point: private boards are not adversarial. They do not push back. The exception, he conceded, is Elon Musk, who actively courts negative feedback. Everyone else, in Baker's framing, gets a warm room.

The corollary for the secondaries boom is that the discipline public markets impose is increasingly deferred to a much later date — and for some companies, never. SpaceX has been private for 24 years, per Rodriguez. If the IPO never comes, the discipline never arrives.

The rotation nobody is pricing

The cleanest structural argument on the panel came from Baker, and it was about the SEC's 15% rule. Long-only mutual funds — Fidelity, Baillie Gifford, Capital Research, Wellington, T. Rowe Price — are permitted to allocate up to 15% of fund assets to private positions. Most self-cap at 3% to 7%, Baker said, for liquidity and rating-agency reasons. Baillie Gifford was forced to sell its SpaceX position last year for regulatory reasons. The implication: hundreds of billions of dollars of latent demand are sitting on the wrong side of a self-imposed limit. When these companies IPO and lockups expire, that capital rotates. Public markets will absorb the supply, and the long-only complexes that self-capped will be buying. The next wave of tech IPOs, in other words, has a structural bid embedded in it that the sell-side has not yet modelled.

Gerstner's own positioning is consistent with that read. "If I had a stack of a hundred, I may put 30 to work today," he said. "I'm never going to pick the bottom. I'm never going to pick the top." The implied posture: add during the drawdown, let the rotation do the work.

What to buy, what to avoid

The panel closed with specific secondaries the speakers find attractive. Gerstner's list, originated in part by Thomas Laffont, included Revolut — a London-based neobank with tens of millions of customers, 14 lines of business, and roughly $1B in revenue, expanding from Europe into the United States. Baker's bucket was the sub-$50B inflection-growth tier: Sierra (Brett Taylor's agent-native Salesforce replacement) and Parlo, which carry binary risk — either the foundation-model incumbents eviscerate them, or they get acquired at a premium. He also named Arista/Drivets, Neurobotics, and Vast. Calacanis and Baker both pointed to Zipline, the drone-delivery business that spent seven years gathering real-world autonomous-flight data in Africa, where Calacanis said maternal mortality in some countries fell 90% to 95% once refrigerated blood and modern medicines could reach villages with one midwife. Gerstner underscored Anthropic's revenue trajectory — "off the charts," he said — as evidence that the AI buildout is being validated by receipts, not narrative.

What the panel is not telling you

Two things went unsaid and are worth saying. First, the panel's interest is not neutral. Gerstner runs a public-market fund; Baker runs a public hedge fund; Rodriguez sells access to secondaries. Each has a position on whether retail should be buying private stocks at all. The Schwab acquisition is the central commercial event for one of them. The bull case for secondaries is the product roadmap for two of them. Read the recommendations through that lens.

Second, the bull case depends on a single, undefended assumption: that the public-market rotation Baker describes will arrive on time. The history of long-only complexes unwinding self-imposed private limits is shorter than the history of long-only complexes discovering new reasons to keep those caps in place. If Baillie Gifford's forced SpaceX sale is the template rather than the exception, the rotation thins out and the secondary premium compresses. The "Investing is the search for truth," per Gerstner, line is a posture, not a forecast.

The structural read stands regardless. Private markets have quietly become the primary capital-formation venue for late-stage US technology. Secondaries are now the principal clearing mechanism. The public-market discipline that once arrived at IPO is being deferred, in some cases indefinitely. And the wrapper industry — 14 levered ETFs on day one, double-carry SPVs, 10% loads — has already begun the work of turning a real asset class into a narrative trade. The window between those two facts is where the next cycle's alpha, and the next cycle's losses, will be made.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0lFjTWx36I