Founders & Management

With direct venture founding experience and additional decades of experience working with executives, founders, investors and board members of private technology companies, we understand the needs and motivations of founders and management. We know that you have spent tremendous time and energy building your company, and often still believe in and hope for its success. However, significant concentration of net worth in illiquid and relatively risky assets is often inappropriate as you consider the personal financial goals of yourself and your family. We offer you the opportunity to diversify your personal portfolio in the same way that your institutional backers have a diversified portfolio of investments within their funds. We typically create partial liquidity to allow you to diversify your financial assets or enable important purchases that come with everyday life. These purchases can include a new home for a growing family, tuition expense for your children, or paying down debt you’ve incurred while building a business working for relatively little current cash compensation. Stock sales can also provide necessary capital to allow you to fund and grow a new business venture. Even if there is no pending use for the liquidity from a private stock sale, recent market turmoil has reminded us once again of the need for prudent asset allocation. Many founders and management become quite enlightened to how concentrated the risk is in their personal portfolio when they consider the combined personal financial and occupational exposure they incur with a career in private company management.

A partial sale of a growing and maturing stake in a private company can often re-align incentives between founders, management, and institutional investors. In many cases, interim liquidity for executive stakeholders who have been creating value over a long period of time provides them with an appropriate reward and further patience to drive the company to even greater heights. Experience has shown that without an interim liquidity option, management can often be incented to sell a company short of its future longer term potential and miss the homerun outcome. Many experienced private company executives realize this and some have even begun to mirror public company executives by establishing a scheduled sale of fractional ownership as their company succeeds and matures.