Modern Capital: The Private Markets Podcast
Conversations with leaders building the infrastructure of private markets.
Episodes
Charlie Tafoya: Trust, Data and the Next Ten Years
When it comes to data, private credit is where private equity was 15 years ago.After months of pressure on the asset class, LPs want more transparency. But credit managers don't have great tools to deliver it. Excel is still the default.By Charlie Tafoya's count, portfolio monitoring software has about 3% penetration in private credit, against roughly 40% among private equity GPs.Private
Altin Kadareja: Get ABF Off Spreadsheets
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 lend
Ken Fine: The Submarine Engineer Rewiring Private Capital
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 Nob
Steven Hunter & Huss El-Sheikh: Breaking Down the Silos in Credit Markets
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
Harald Collet: Who Wrote That Spreadsheet Formula?
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.
Joan Kehoe: We've Been Here Before... But Not This Fast
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 runnin
Amit Gairola & Griff Norville: Customer Obsession Comes to Private Markets
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 qu
Michael Gruener: Asset Management's Third Wave (and What Will Break It)
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
Jake Walker: Money in Motion, at Scale
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 annu
Ben Haber: The Omnibus Unlock
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 institutio
Jason Wenk & Michael Miller: How to Serve More (and Serve Better) in Private Markets
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 institution
Luke Flemmer: The Private Markets Inflection Point
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 priv
Chris Sparenberg: The Raw Materials of Private Markets
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 assi
Samir Kaji: How Everyone Can Invest Like an Institution
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 s
Thomas McHugh: Building One Language for All of Finance
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."
Kelly Rodriques: The Private Markets Moment We're In
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
John Markell & Matt Schwartz: What's Going on Under the Hood in Private Credit?
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
Amar Varma: From Tinder to the Plumbing of Private Markets
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 m
Talia Klein: Bringing a Quadrillion Dollar Utility to Private Markets
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. S
Apoorv Saxena: Building AI That Actually Works in Finance
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
Ed Brandman: Fixing the $20 Trillion PDF Problem
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 poi
Andrew Tarver: Tens of millions of trades and no one is ready
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 M
Alex Robinson: What "Done" Looks Like in Private Markets
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 w
Private Credit Meets the Valley, with John Markell and Matt Schwartz
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 techn
Modern Capital | trailer
Introducing: Modern Capital, The Private Markets Podcast. Conversations with the leaders building the infrastructure of modern private markets.
Rob Heyvaert: The Plumber of 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,
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