When Private Stays Private: Inside the Secondary Boom Reshaping How AI Giants Get Liquid
Key takeaways from All-In Podcast liquidity panel with Forge Global CEO Kelly Rodriques, Altimeter Capital founder & CEO Brad GerstnerDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and Atreides ManagementDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → managing partner & CIO Gavin BakerDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → (June 2026):
- Secondaries now rival IPOs as the primary exit: Gerstner argued secondary-market volume is at record highs — roughly double the 2021 peak — with buying into names like SpaceX, Anthropic and Anduril representing about 31% of all primary venture activity in 2025.
- From discount to premium: Where late-stage secondaries traded around 80 cents on the dollar a couple of years ago, the panel said the market now clears at a premium of roughly 106 cents, a sign of how much demand has built for private exposure.
- Companies are staying private longer — but maybe shouldn't: Baker and Gerstner agreed there is no good reason to stay private, citing Mark Zuckerberg's view that the rigour of public-market scrutiny would have helped Facebook avoid its costly HTML5-versus-apps detour.
- The employee liquidity problem: Baker described staff who are "wealthy on paper but cash poor" after seven-to-fifteen years at private champions like SpaceX, making orderly tender programmes essential as companies delay listing.
- Forge's pitch — an asset class, not the wild west: Rodriques positioned Forge as the infrastructure making private shares a legitimate, accessible asset class, contrasting it with off-market SPVs charging up to 10% load fees, double carry and gray-market mark-ups.
- Democratising access: The panel debated $50,000 slices of SpaceX, $500 minimums and allocating 3–7% of portfolios to privates, alongside Gerstner's Invest America push to bring retail investors into the asset class.
- Who's on the other side of the trade: The group pressed on whether family offices and high-net-worth buyers "chasing the name" are the discerning capital or the sucker at the table, and how to systematise secondaries into something closer to an exchange.
- The bull case stays intact: Despite frothy pricing, Baker reiterated that the ROI on AI has "empirically, factually, unambiguously been positive," underpinning continued demand for the private AI basket.
Source: All-In Podcast — Liquidity Secondary Markets Panel, June 2026.
