Podcast
Modern Capital: The Private Markets Podcast
Hosted by Marc Andrew · EN
Conversations with leaders building the infrastructure of private markets.
19episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Michael Gruener: Asset Management's Third Wave (and What Will Break It)
Yesterday00:54:51Tap to summarizeThe mutual fund put investing in the hands of ordinary savers. The ETF made it cheaper, faster and borderless. Both transformed asset management. Both also required infrastructure that didn't exist when the product arrived. Private markets are wave three. And the infrastructure problem is bigger this time.Michael Gruener lived through both of the first two: mutual funds at Goldman in the early 2000s and ETFs at BlackRock through the iShares expansion across Eastern Europe and the Middle East. He knows what a category-defining shift looks like from the inside. And he knows what breaks when the rails are not ready.Now, as co-CEO of Titanbay, he's building the infrastructure for wave three before it breaks.In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Michael and Marc cover:Why the semi-liquid evergreen fund is the ETF of private markets - and why the infrastructure underneath it is not readyThe "know your client, know your trade" problem - and why today's trade rails were built to do the oppositeWhat an 8% NIGO rate looks like when a model portfolio rebalance triggers 100,000 trades in a single dayWhy the fix is faster than the industry expects - and why it comes down to 24 namesHow Titanbay connects to distributors in whatever format they have, applies private market logic, and hands back a trade in good orderWhere the boundaries between public and private markets are heading - and the one condition that has to be met first"That trade infrastructure was not built for this product... It was built for the industry as it existed in 1996, when I started at Goldman. Nobody went back and rebuilt it."Wave three is already in motion. This is a conversation about what it breaks on the way through.
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Jake Walker: Money in Motion, at Scale
1w ago01:08:49Tap to summarizePrivate markets have solved origination. The products are built. The constraint now is a wealth management tech stack built for mutual funds and ETFs that cannot run semi-liquid products at scale.Jake Walker is Partner and COO of Client & Product Solutions at Apollo, where the wealth distribution build he has spent five years running has gone from zero to more than $17 billion in annual channel raises. Private markets are joining the $147 trillion world of traditional asset management. The infrastructure needed to carry them hasn't kept pace.His read: the fix costs $400 to $800 million spread across 50 to 70 endpoints. "Pennies for everybody," he says. But the problem isn't money. It's coordination. Every industry that hit this moment solved it the same way. The wealth management ecosystem never has. In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Jake and Marc cover:Why the wealth management stack breaks when semi-liquid products arrive at scaleHow omnibus accounts could unlock distribution and what needs to be true for subscription documents to disappearApollo's push for estimated daily value across its entire credit bookThe Netflix parallel: what Reed Hastings had to build before anyone could stream (and what private markets needs to build before it can distribute)Whether asset managers become hardware providers or build the coalition that makes it unnecessary"I want the rail to be ubiquitous... we need it ubiquitous because I think if the market grows, our firms will grow. I will compete on brand, and content, and client service, and investment performance. I will not need to compete on how the infrastructure works."The money is in motion. The rails aren't ready. And the only path forward is a level of collaboration that this industry has never been forced to attempt before.
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Ben Haber: The Omnibus Unlock
2w ago00:58:34Tap to summarizeThe wealth channel buildout everyone in private markets is betting on has a plumbing problem.Evergreen funds are growing fast. Roughly 300 products, ~$550 billion in AUM and demand from wealth platforms that is real and accelerating. These vehicles are designed to bring private markets within the reach of everyday portfolios, but the infrastructure underneath them was built for institutions writing $50M+ checks, not hundreds of thousands of investors at lower minimums.The NIGO rate (orders failing on documentation, compliance, or funding before they ever clear) sits at 8%. Every subscription flows bilaterally between advisor, custodian and transfer agent. At the scale this market needs to reach, that system breaks.Ben Haber is co-founder and CEO of Monark Markets. He started building it as a sophomore at NYU. On graduation day, he skipped the ceremony to close on the assets of a bankrupt fintech instead. That deal crystallized the thesis: private markets don’t need a better interface. They need better rails.His answer is omnibus: one account per fund per custodian, netting all orders rather than processing each one individually. The structure Schwab built for mutual funds with OneSource, applied to private markets.In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Ben and Marc cover:Why the "Robinhood for alts" D2C wave failed and why competing with Fidelity and Schwab for the same customer was never going to workWhy evergreen funds cannot sit inside model portfolios without omnibus underneath themHow the pending paperwork crisis in private markets can be solved by simply removing the paperwork"One omnibus account per fund, per custodian... dramatically less than the hundreds of thousands or millions of individual accounts the transfer agent would need to record. A real ability to actually scale the evergreen fund market in a way that is simply not possible today."The wealth channel opportunity is well understood. This conversation is about what has to get built before it gets there.
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Jason Wenk & Michael Miller: How to Serve More (and Serve Better) in Private Markets
3w ago01:00:08Tap to summarizeThere are fewer than 4,000 public companies in the United States. In the late 1990s, there were 8,000.The companies that left public markets didn't stop creating wealth. They simply stopped being accessible to ordinary investors. The world’s most sophisticated institutional investors know this. The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, widely regarded as one of the global leaders in institutional investing, is 60% allocated to alternatives. The average high-net-worth individual is under 2%. That gap isn't a knowledge problem.It's an infrastructure problem.Jason Wenk built Altruist to close it. Not with a new fund structure or a regulatory exemption, but by rebuilding the plumbing from scratch. He spent over a decade building middleware on top of legacy custodial infrastructure before concluding the ceiling was structural. In 2018, he stepped down and built a self-clearing custodian: one of the rarest things in financial services.Michael Miller came from Robinhood, where he worked on product strategy for brokerage and IPO access. At Altruist, he's building the private markets layer on top of that same infrastructure, working toward the thing the industry hasn't cracked: alternatives that move as fast as a public equity trade.In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Jason, Michael and Marc cover:Why building a self-clearing custodian is harder than launching a rocket, and why the incumbents' inertia made it worth doing anywayThe subscription workflow that takes under 90 seconds and less than 10 clicks, and why that alone still shocks advisors who've spent 20 years in the industryWhat happens to a model portfolio when public markets sell off 15% and the private side has a 30-to-60-day settlement windowHazel, Altruist's AI tax agent, and how a product that does in two minutes what used to take a family office 10 people wiped out $120 billion in market cap in under 24 hoursWhy "self-driving money" was never achievable with software alone (and why it might be achievable now)"You kind of go, hey, I want the people that I grew up with and the families I knew, I want them to be able to have a fighting chance. And you can't do that if the minimums are 20 times higher than how much capital they have."The infrastructure layer private markets has been missing is being built. The question is whether the industry can move fast enough to meet the demand that's already here.
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Luke Flemmer: The Private Markets Inflection Point
4w ago00:51:36Tap to summarizeMarkets don't just happen. They're built.Public markets weren't a completely organic development. They were engineered over centuries, through boom and design and crisis. Every layer of trust investors now take for granted: the information rights, the settlement rails and the benchmarks, all came from people who did the work and built them.Luke Flemmer is one of those people. He runs private assets at MSCI. His central point: private markets are at the very start of that work.Private used to be the spice. Now it's the main dish. Institutional portfolios hold between 20 and 50 percent in private assets. The allocations scaled fast, but the infrastructure underneath them did not.Most people picture private equity as a guy in a vest in Midtown. Most of it is actually pension money. It is individual savers and capital managed on behalf of regular people. Private capital is public capital.Bad information flow is intrinsically value destructive. It slows the market and shrinks returns for the people these institutions serve.In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Luke and Marc cover:Asset-level benchmarks: why investors need to see exposure across funds, not just inside themDaily nowcasting indexes for PE and private credit - closing the gap between quarterly marks and real valueThe classification problem: the industry still can't agree on what to call things (and what that costs)Why information asymmetry in private markets is mostly underdevelopment, not design, and why closing that gap doesn't harm returnsHow AI lets firms leapfrog data infrastructure gaps and what separates the institutions that will author that shift from those that absorb it"You need some degree of transparency to drive more robust price formation. Once you start to drive price formation, you start to drive liquidity. Once you start to drive liquidity, you kick off this data flywheel."Markets get built by people who decide to build them.
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Chris Sparenberg: The Raw Materials of Private Markets
May 2200:35:09Tap to summarizeS&P Global built the information layer for public markets. Private markets is next.In 1860, Henry Varnum Poor published a manual on American railroads to inform investors. That business became Standard and Poor’s.The mission then was the same as it is now: build the information infrastructure for a market that is scaling faster than anyone can track.Private markets is the current assignment.The problem: a market that cannot measure itself. Performance data arrives in PDFs. Every manager reports differently. There is no agreed taxonomy, no standard for comparison. More data is flowing through private markets than ever before... and almost none of it is comparable.Chris Sparenberg started his career at Cambridge Associates building private markets benchmarks from the ground up. He’s now Head of Private Markets Strategy and GTM at S&P Global Market Intelligence - and he’s spent his entire career in private markets data, technology and analytics.In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Chris and Marc cover:The work S&P Global has done with Cambridge Associates and Mercer to create a new taxonomy and performance analytics for private marketsWhy more data is creating more complexity, not lessThe GP/LP disclosure challenge and how it's quietly resolvingThe role played by iLEVEL as a data clearinghouse, which allows GPs to report to their LPs on a one-to-many basisWhy we're in the second inning (and what separates the firms already building from the ones just arriving)"We want to be in the raw materials business. We want to collect data at the atomic level, enrich it, make it useful to our clients, but also really give them the tools to use it as they need to."
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Samir Kaji: How Everyone Can Invest Like an Institution
May 1500:48:32Tap to summarizeThe next decade belongs to people who can think like institutions.Individual investors sit at 1-2% alternatives allocations. Institutions are at 20%. That gap is closing fast because the infrastructure to bridge it is finally being built.Samir Kaji spent 22 years watching that infrastructure not exist. Thirteen years at Silicon Valley Bank. Nine at First Republic. Both now gone. What he saw inside them is what convinced him the problem was never access. It was everything underneath access: the portfolio construction tools, the liquidity mechanisms, and the frameworks institutions take for granted and individuals don't have.That's what Allocate is built to fix. Four and a half years in, over $4 billion has moved through its pipes, connecting wealth advisors to private funds across venture, private equity and private credit. 360 advisor firms. 4,000 individual investors. In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Samir and Marc cover:Why "semi-liquid" isn't the same as liquid, and what actually happens when individuals need outThe barbell: why large funds and emerging managers are playing completely different games, and how to build across bothWhat institutional portfolio construction actually looks like, and why accredited doesn't mean readyWhere private markets are heading and what has to be true for individuals to actually benefit"It's a way to generate alpha, but only if you get it right. So, let's build the system for that."Private markets are heading past $30 trillion. The wealth channel infrastructure to deliver them responsibly is being built right now. This is the conversation behind it.
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Thomas McHugh: Building One Language for All of Finance
May 800:49:29Tap to summarizeFinance speaks a thousand languages. Every market data provider formats corporate actions differently. Every custodian speaks a different dialect. Something as simple as receiving a dividend (ten shares of one company) might involve five custodians, six venues, three providers of corporate actions and ten investors across five different share classes, each with different tax obligations."Something that sounds incredibly trivial turns into this web of really complicated translation problems."Thomas McHugh spent fifteen years inside that problem. Network engineering at Morgan Stanley, Monte Carlo engines for complex derivatives, running quant development and front office risk at RBS through and after 2008. He co-founded FINBOURNE to solve it: one platform that speaks every language finance has invented, across every asset class. It raised one of the largest Series B rounds in UK fintech history.In this episode of The Modern Capital Podcast, Thomas and Marc cover:Why a single trade record has five different dates and how one record replaces five systemsWhy blockchain can't solve books and records: it only moves forward, can't restate history and everyone wants it private anywayThe three layers of the AI stack in finance: why the UI layer is dead, who wins orchestration and where the real moat livesWhy 60-80% of AI proof of concepts never reach production - and the permissions gap nobody is solvingThe SaaSpocalypse: why single-feature vertical SaaS is at genuine risk and what survives itGet the translation layer right and AI works. Get it wrong and the proof of concept never reaches production. Thomas has spent a decade building the former.
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Kelly Rodriques: The Private Markets Moment We're In
May 100:59:48Tap to summarizeGo to Yahoo Finance. Search SpaceX. You'll find a price. That number comes from Forge.Private markets are the fastest-growing part of institutional finance, and they've never had what public markets took fifty years to build: reliable price discovery, standardized custody, a trading infrastructure that works at scale.Kelly Rodriques spent his career positioning as the infrastructure layer of industries at their inflection points. And in 2018, he took over a Y Combinator trading platform, rebranded it Forge and set out to build all three simultaneously.In July 2025, he demoed the next-generation platform to the ten largest financial institutions in the country. Several came back wanting to buy the company. One sent Chuck Schwab himself to take the meeting.In this episode, Kelly and Marc cover:The price discovery gap: why none of the funds currently packaging private shares are anchored to underlying NAV and why that should alarm every allocator watching this spaceThe 401(k) moment: an executive order opened $18 trillion in retirement savings to private markets, and the infrastructure to absorb it is still being builtThe civic case: 8,000 public companies in 1999, 4,000 today - and why restricting private markets to accredited investors is an inequality problemPISCES: why global exchanges are racing to know private companies before they go public"In the early 70s, we set out to democratize investing. And we've been watching you for a couple of years, and you're democratizing the private markets."Chuck Schwab said that to Kelly Rodriques in a conference room in 2025. When Chuck Schwab buys your company, democratization stops being a vision. It becomes an obligation.
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John Markell & Matt Schwartz: What's Going on Under the Hood in Private Credit?
Apr 2200:29:56Tap to summarizeThe headlines say private credit is in trouble. Here's what the practitioners are saying.The pressure is real. The cause is complicated. Redemptions are up - but the story isn't as simple as loans failing. The real story right now is relative portfolio exposure.Investors are seeing "software exposure" in their portfolios and many justifiably want to reduce it, given AI uncertainty around business models. Whether the underlying loans justify that fear is still an open question.What isn't debatable: the redemption pressure is real, and the market infrastructure to absorb it doesn't exist yet.John Markell of Armentum Partners and Matt Schwartz, Head of U.S. Finance at DLA Piper, live inside this market every day. In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, John, Matt, and Marc cover:Why software credit has been the best-performing segment of private credit over the past five years and why that track record isn't cutting through the current noiseThe PE-backed vs. minority-owned distinction the market is missing: 2x ARR leverage versus 0.5x is a fundamentally different credit risk - the market is pricing them identicallyWhy back-leverage providers tightening advance rates is adding pressure one step further removed from the actual loansWhy software loans can't be sold the way conforming loans can and what lenders under liquidity pressure are discovering too lateFear compresses entry prices: who the sophisticated buyers are, why they're watching closely right now and why secondaries are their entry pointWhy the secondary market infrastructure to connect buyers and sellers is forming fast"Right now, software's being shoved in with other conforming loans, and people are going, wait, I see it there, I don't want it. So there has to be another way to do it."The buyers and sellers exist. The secondary market infrastructure to connect them is still forming. But it's forming fast - and this conversation is happening right in the middle of it.
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