A few hundred GP names mattered, and they competed on one number: returns. There was no pressure to care about reporting quality, data timeliness, or what it felt like to be on the receiving end of a quarterly PDF.

That era is over.

Amit Gairola spent a decade at Amazon, where every decision came back to one question: what does this do for the customer? He brought that question to private markets and built Daphne, a permissioned data layer that makes straight-through data processing possible between GPs and the allocators, platforms and fund of funds that invest with them.

Griff Norville is Co-Head of Innovation at Hamilton Lane, one of the largest allocators in private markets with roughly $1 trillion in assets under management and supervision - and both a backer and live user of Daphne. He's watched the industry evolve from one where delivering returns was enough, to one where a new class of investors brings expectations formed by public markets, consumer technology and the Amazon-era assumption that a good experience is simply the baseline.

The problem they're solving is not subtle.

"The uncomfortable truth in this industry — for all the growth we've had and the improvements that we've made — is that we still operate with PDFs and emails and cumbersome data rooms."

In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Amit, Griff, and Marc cover:

• Why private markets built its infrastructure around documents instead of data and why that logic no longer holds
• The difference between data extraction and straight-through processing, and what closing that gap actually requires
• Why standardization keeps failing - and why AI-powered translation may make it irrelevant
• How evergreen funds moving from quarterly to daily valuations are making the current system untenable
• What 401(k) access and secondary market growth require from data infrastructure before either can scale

Private markets has to start treating its investors like customers. Delivering a great LP experience is becoming the new standard, and the infrastructure to make it possible is only now being built.

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 ready
• The "know your client, know your trade" problem - and why today's trade rails were built to do the opposite
• What an 8% NIGO rate looks like when a model portfolio rebalance triggers 100,000 trades in a single day
• Why the fix is faster than the industry expects - and why it comes down to 24 names
• How Titanbay connects to distributors in whatever format they have, applies private market logic, and hands back a trade in good order
• Where 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.

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 scale
• How omnibus accounts could unlock distribution and what needs to be true for subscription documents to disappear
• Apollo's push for estimated daily value across its entire credit book
• The 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.

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 work
• Why evergreen funds cannot sit inside model portfolios without omnibus underneath them
• How 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.

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 anyway
• The 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 industry
• What happens to a model portfolio when public markets sell off 15% and the private side has a 30-to-60-day settlement window
• Hazel, 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 hours
• Why "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.

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 them
• Daily nowcasting indexes for PE and private credit - closing the gap between quarterly marks and real value
• The 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 returns
• How 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.

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 markets
• Why more data is creating more complexity, not less
• The GP/LP disclosure challenge and how it's quietly resolving
• The role played by iLEVEL as a data clearinghouse, which allows GPs to report to their LPs on a one-to-many basis
• Why 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."

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 out
• The barbell: why large funds and emerging managers are playing completely different games, and how to build across both
• What institutional portfolio construction actually looks like, and why accredited doesn't mean ready
• Where 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.

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 systems
• Why blockchain can't solve books and records: it only moves forward, can't restate history and everyone wants it private anyway
• The three layers of the AI stack in finance: why the UI layer is dead, who wins orchestration and where the real moat lives
• Why 60-80% of AI proof of concepts never reach production - and the permissions gap nobody is solving
• The SaaSpocalypse: why single-feature vertical SaaS is at genuine risk and what survives it

Get 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.

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 space
• The 401(k) moment: an executive order opened $18 trillion in retirement savings to private markets, and the infrastructure to absorb it is still being built
• The civic case: 8,000 public companies in 1999, 4,000 today - and why restricting private markets to accredited investors is an inequality problem
• PISCES: 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.

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 noise
• The 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 identically
• Why back-leverage providers tightening advance rates is adding pressure one step further removed from the actual loans
• Why software loans can't be sold the way conforming loans can and what lenders under liquidity pressure are discovering too late
• Fear compresses entry prices: who the sophisticated buyers are, why they're watching closely right now and why secondaries are their entry point
• Why 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.

Amar Varma can.

In the early 2010s, his mobile incubator Hatch Labs ran ten ideas through a corporate skunkworks inside IAC. Nine went nowhere. The tenth became Tinder.

You know the rest.

Now he's five exits deep and building Mantle, working on a problem that's less culturally famous but more consequential for anyone managing private markets capital at scale.

Public markets work because everything reconciles. CUSIP codes. DTCC clearing. Buyers and sellers matched every day. Bloomberg exists because that foundation does.

Private markets have cap tables updated by hand at 9pm on closing night. LPs logging into fifteen portals with fifteen 2FA codes. Subscription agreements tucked in a drawer. No identifier that follows a security from issuance to LP portfolio. No reconciliation layer. 

The market is $30 trillion and growing. A 2025 executive order just opened $12 trillion in retirement assets to alternatives. 

The infrastructure problem doesn't get smaller from here.

In this episode, Amar and Marc cover:

• The Bloomberg-DTCC parallel: why public markets work and what private markets needs to build first
• USB plug fests: what standards-building in Silicon Valley in the 90s teaches about private markets today
• Why the cap table is the birth certificate and how connecting it to the LP portfolio changes everything
• The August 2025 executive order on alternatives and why it accelerates the infrastructure problem before it solves it
• What five exits actually teaches you about getting lucky

"Nobody gets tired when they're doing the thing. They get tired when they're not successful."

The infrastructure moment for private markets is here. Varma has spent thirty years showing up before anyone else knew there was a problem.

This one is worth your time.

Every equity trade in the United States - over 99% of them - clears and settles through DTCC. 

Last year alone, it processed $4 quadrillion in activity. A million billions. Invisibly, at a cost of cents per transaction.

Private markets have no equivalent. Yet.

Private shares settle at T+90. Public markets just moved to T+1. Subscription documents still get stamped manually. Retail allocations to alternatives sit at 3% (institutions are at 20%), and if that gap closes even halfway, it adds $10 trillion in new capital that today's infrastructure cannot handle.

That's the problem Talia Klein woke up to on day one as Head of Wealth and Investment Solutions at DTCC.

She's built financial infrastructure at every major inflection point of the last fifteen years. Collateral eligibility systems at J.P. Morgan after the financial crisis - earning a patent in the process. Institutional blockchain at Digital Asset Holdings before most people knew what it was. Crypto custody at BNY, built from scratch, in five years. 

She has a habit of showing up early to the infrastructure problems that later turn out to matter most.

In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Talia and Marc cover:

• The 1960s paperwork crisis that shut the NYSE on Wednesday afternoons - and why the digital version is already forming in private markets
• Why DTCC's FundServe playbook is the exact template private markets needs - and why it won't be a straight copy.
• The three-sided market problem: why private shares can't just be mapped to public equities
• T+90 vs. T+1: who closes that gap, and how
• Why the standards problem isn't technical - it's about convening 100 institutions and making it worth their while
• Where DTCC is placing its bets across private funds, private shares and private credit

"There's gotta be a better way." 

That phrase built DTCC in 1986. Talia thinks private markets is about to say it out loud - and that the organization that solved it for public markets is the right one to solve it again.

The infrastructure moment for private markets isn't coming. It's here.

Now he's building Obin AI - which just came out of stealth backed by Motive Partners with Fei-Fei Li as advisor - to deliver AI agents that operate at 99% accuracy inside financial institutions, fully auditable, replacing core workflows end-to-end.

In this podcast, we talk about why most firms spreading AI across 50 use cases are destroying value, what Dimon's three-hour first-principles interrogation revealed, and why the winners in financial AI won't be the fastest movers... 

They'll be the ones who build the right foundations first.

He thinks private markets are heading to the same inflection point.

"You think about all the information that LPs want to get their hands on related to portfolio reporting every quarter end... that today, still for the most part, comes via PDFs."

In 2026. 

PDFs.

That's the problem Ed came out of retirement to solve. After 11 years as CIO at KKR - where he grew the tech team from 5 people to 140 - he founded ToltIQ, an AI-native due diligence platform built specifically for the complexity of private markets deal workflows.

In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Ed and Marc cover:

• Why due diligence hasn't changed since the days of boxes of documents - and why AI can finally fix it
• The FIX protocol parallel: what private markets needs to do to scale to $30T+
• How ToltIQ is applying AI to VDRs, credit agreements and expert network calls
• Why waiting 6-9 months on AI adoption is already a competitive disadvantage
• The new ToltIQ + DealEngine partnership, and what it signals about where the market is going

"There's really not upside to delaying it. And if anything, you put yourself at a competitive disadvantage."

Ed is one of the most thoughtful voices in private markets technology - and one of the most generous with his thinking. This one is worth your time.

In this episode, Andrew Tarver lays out math that should get everyone interested in scaling private markets very focused indeed:

Tarver is one of private markets' most important builders. He's co-founded a unicorn, dozen other companies, ran Capco UK as CEO at 35, and now helps lead private markets strategy across Motive Partners' portfolio - including InvestCloud, which runs $4 trillion in managed accounts.

Here's the problem:

The industry is staring down a whole new version of the Paperwork Crisis with even a 7-8% model portfolio shift (it'll likely be higher). 

That's hundreds of billions in new allocations. And it's not just the initial orders. After a big public markets move, model portfolios automatically rebalance. Markets drop 15%, you're suddenly over-allocated to privates, and the system triggers a wave of redemptions to get back in line. 

Every quarter, every drift correction, every strat change generates more orders. 

At $10K-$20K ticket sizes, that's tens of millions of orders. Per year.

Today's infrastructure handles about 1,000 orders per operational FTE annually. The industry's current NIGO (failed trade) rate sits at 8%.

Do the math:

• At current staffing ratios, scaling this requires 48,000 new operational staff
• At $200K–$300K per head, someone needs to find $10 billion to pay them
• And that's just one platform — before RIAs, 401(k)s, or fintechs like Robinhood and Revolut enter

Tarver's analogy is perfect: private markets today are where payments were 15 years ago: paper slips, manual processing, three copies of everything. 

The industry needs to go from imprinter to tap-to-pay.

His answer: digital standards, rules-based infrastructure, and accountability at every node... the same playbook he ran at Goldman, UBS, and Merrill's for two decades.

"We are no longer in the Wild West."

This is the most important infrastructure conversation in private markets right now.

Congratulations to Tarver and the entire Motive team - including Rob Heyvaert - for leading this charge. 

Huge episode. Listen to the full thing!

Juniper Square now serves 2,500 GPs, supports trillions in capital, and has 700,000 LPs on its platform - likely the largest direct-to-private-markets LP network anywhere.

In this conversation, Alex maps where private markets infrastructure is headed over the next 10-15 years. He shares his vision for what "done" looks like: factor ETFs, a FICO score for managers, near-zero trading costs, and diversified private markets baskets in your 401(k). 

We also dig into the origin story (a FedEx truck and a two-inch stack of paperwork), why standards-by-committee always fail, and how Juniper Square reached dozens of customers before it ever launched publicly.

Key Topics

• The FedEx moment that launched Juniper Square
• Why private markets technology was overlooked for decades
• What "next-gen fund administration" actually means
• The two tsunamis hitting private markets: AI and retail
• Why standards will emerge from scale, not committees
• Alex's end-state vision for private markets maturity
• The coming flourishing of niche managers
• How Alex uses AI personally (and which models for what)
• Time management with three kids and a billion-dollar startup

This shift is creating new opportunities - and new risks - that most founders and fund managers don't fully understand.

John Markell of Armentum Partners and Matt Schwartz, Head of U.S. Finance at DLA Piper, join me to unpack growth credit: the segment of private credit quietly reshaping how technology companies scale.

We cover:

• What growth credit actually is - and why it's different from the private credit you read about in the papers
• The gap between bank capital (under 10% risk) and equity risk (north of 20%) - and who's filling it
• How SVB's collapse changed underwriting, covenant packages, and deal sizes
• Why enterprise software lending is "way, way, way saturated" - and where the white space is
• What founders get wrong when pitching lenders vs. equity investors
• The three things every founder should know before taking on debt
• Why some funds net 19% to LPs while others struggle to clear 12%

Whether you're a founder considering debt or a fund manager looking for origination opportunities, this conversation will change how you think about the gap between bank capital and equity risk.

Follow Modern Capital on your podcast player of choice.

Conversations with the leaders building the infrastructure of modern private markets. 

Rob Heyvaert has spent three decades building the plumbing of finance: founding companies acquired by IBM and FIS, scaling Capco to 7,000 people across 21 offices, and now orchestrating a portfolio at Motive Partners that includes InvestCloud, FNZ, Daphne, CAIS, and others shaping how capital flows.

In this inaugural episode of Modern Capital, Rob makes a striking claim: private markets are approaching their "Bezos moment" - the point where customer obsession finally becomes possible, and necessary.

What you'll learn:

The infrastructure gap: Financial services has spent decades building siloed systems that barely communicate. Rob explains why private markets now offer a rare opportunity to rebuild from first principles—and why legacy systems are the real barrier to customer delight.

Why 60/40 portfolios are a historical accident. Institutional investors have 40% allocations to private markets. Retail investors have 2%. Rob argues this isn't about risk... it's about infrastructure that was never built to serve the individual investor.

The volume problem that will determine winners. If model portfolios move to even 5% private market allocations, transaction volumes will increase 80-100x. Most providers aren't remotely prepared. Rob explains who will be.

What your children's wealth management looks like. Will they use a "super app" that knows everything about them? Or will they still rely on Johnny the wealth advisor - who might be human, might be AI, might be something in between? Rob offers a surprisingly nuanced view.