Modern Capital: The Private Markets Podcast

Asset-based finance started with credit cards, auto loans and trade finance. It now covers 70 to 80 kinds of collateral, with music rights and cell towers among them. Every party in a deal runs its own system, and those systems were not built to talk to each other.

In a receivables facility, the originator reports what's in the pool, monthly or weekly, in a spreadsheet. Someone at the lender checks it against the invoice PDFs and the bank statement, by hand. On a $50 to $60 million line, that can mean 1,500 new receivables each week.

Altin Kadareja spent his...

The most opaque asset in private capital is a relationship.

Every investment starts with a path to a CEO or a board. That path lives in one partner's head, inbox and calendar.

Ken Fine spent five years designing propulsion systems for nuclear submarines, where a single error could sink a boat with the crew still aboard. Then more than a decade at Financial Engines, turning Bill Sharpe's Nobel-winning models into a product individual savers could use to run their 401(k)s.

Today he runs Affinity, a CRM purpose-built for private capital. His first...

For years, the credit markets ran on clean lines. A bank loan was one thing. A bond was another. Private credit sat off to the side.

Those lines are gone. Global credit is becoming one integrated market, $145 trillion in scale, and almost none of its infrastructure was built for what it has become.

Steven Hunter and Huss El-Sheikh met at university, shared a London flat and turned a shared frustration into 9fin. The incumbent solution to reading credit documents was 5,000 people retyping them by hand. They taught machines to do it instead. Today, it's a...

Private credit grew faster than the infrastructure built to monitor it.

LPs are still reconciling loan agency notices, compliance certificates and financial statements by hand, out of spreadsheets held together by Excel formulas nobody currently employed can explain. The operational risk is real, and for some of the world's most important institutional investors, it's now front and center.

Harald Collet's answer isn't a standard. He's betting that private markets data will never standardize the way public markets did. 

So he built Alkymi to absorb the mess, rather than wait for the industry to c...

Fund administration was born in a world where a GP's entire LP base could fit in a small conference room. That world is gone. 

Now it's being asked to handle 500,000 investors. The subscription docs, data workflows and staffing models were never built for this. Neither was the technology underneath them.

Joan Kehoe watched this transition happen once before. In 2006, hedge funds were running on infrastructure built for a different era, with quarterly cadences, manual processes and legacy platforms too embedded to move. She built the company that fixed it. Data transparency. Daily reporting. The w...

Private markets grew for decades without obsessing over the investor experience. 

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 s...

The 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 w...

Private 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...

The 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...

There 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 fu...

Markets 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 p...

S&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. 

The 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.<...

Finance 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...

Go 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 p...

The 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...

Not many people can say they sold a product to Barry Diller that changed how an entire generation meets.

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...

Every time you allocate money into your 401(k), DTCC processes it. 

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 ca...

Apoorv Saxena built AI at Google under Fei-Fei Li, at JPMorgan under Jamie Dimon, and led AI implementation across the portfolio at Silver Lake. Each one taught him something different about where the technology actually breaks.

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...

In the early 1990s, Ed Brandman was at JP Morgan helping build FIX, the protocol that automated order flow between Wall Street's biggest buy-side and sell-side firms. It took years, regulatory pressure and a handful of 800-pound gorilla institutions to force the change. But it happened. And it reshaped public markets forever.

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."

Tens of millions of trades are coming to private markets in the near term. 

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 t...

Alex Robinson has spent a decade building the infrastructure private markets never had. 

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...

350+ lenders now finance cash-flow negative businesses. Five years ago, maybe a handful would.

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:

Introducing: Modern Capital, The Private Markets Podcast. 

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

What happens when the man who engineered the clearing system for the euro at age 25 turns his full attention on 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...