Modern Capital: The Private Markets Podcast

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...