Inside the Revival of Venture Capital Liquidity with an Industry Pioneer

One thing that's interesting in our market that's starting to happen is that even, participants in the secondary market are starting to get liquidity through secondaries, which historically had never happened. There's so much capital sitting in the system that it's not enough liquidity to to give back to the market. And so, we think that the venture growth market, on the secondary side of the market can be larger than the primary. I think this is one of the most exciting times I've ever seen for investing, and I think we're just beginning in

Welcome to Goldman Sachs Exchanges, great investors. I'm Michael Brammeyer. Venture capital has a liquidity problem. Companies are staying private longer, exits have slowed, and limited partners are asking a simple question, when do I actually get paid? My guest Hans Wildens built industry ventures around that question, growing it into a leading venture secondary specialist with roughly $7,000,000,000 in assets under supervision before agreeing to combine with Goldman Sachs Asset Management in January 2026. Today, how severe is the venture liquidity crunch? What's real in AI? And why he finall

Thank you for having me.

For our listeners that may not be focused on secondaries all the time, if I'm an early entrepreneur, if I'm an early VC investor, or even a later stage investor, what are the reasons that people are selling to secondary players like you? Well, the

reasons have been changing over time. So when we first started twenty six years ago, most of it was distressed sellers, Sellers that no longer wanted the investments anymore, like a corporate venture capital fund decided to terminate their investments and then sell the portfolio or hedge fund decided to stop making private investments and just concentrate on liquid securities and sell their private portfolio. A lot of it was distressed sellers just exiting things they didn't need or want anymore. And then that evolved over time to include sellers that had made a big gain. And I would say a vas

Let's go down one level to what's actually happening in existing venture capital portfolios because if you talk to investors, be they entrepreneurs or limited partners or venture capitalists, there's just a huge illiquidity problem out there. So what's going on? Is it a problem of marks? Is it a plumbing? What are the big issues that you're seeing that are holding us back from a liquidity standpoint?

I think it's everything. There's a cross current of AI, growth and non growth due to AI in the private market, so that's one issue. Think the nav marks, some of them are undervalued, some of them are overvalued, and that's becoming more extreme of whether or not something's very overvalued or very undervalued because of the way NAV is held in the funds. I think there's also kind of concentration in the market now around certain names. And so you're seeing a lot of crowding in like the top 25 private names in the market. When you go beyond the top 25 private names and there's 30,000 private com

So given all this illiquidity, what are you seeing with buyer and seller expectations and does it depend on when the companies were funded?

It's really interesting. I mean there's a cohort of older companies that haven't seen acceleration. They've seen deacceleration with the AI technologies being adopted because budgets shifting away from what they were doing or maybe a lot of the AI coding technology can kind of replace what built. And then you're seeing the exact opposite in some older companies where they've rebuilt their tech stack to be AI first and resold that into t