Industry Ventures Founder Hans Swildens - how secondaries became the dominant path for VC exits

**Auren Hoffman** (0:02)
Hello, fellow data nerds, welcome to World of DaaS. I'm your host, Auren Hoffman, CEO of NQB8 and GP of Flex Capital. Discover more episodes, get weekly data as a service news, original content, articles on data, and more at worldofdaas.com. That's worldofdaas.com. Hello, fellow data nerds, my guest today is Hans Swildens. Hans is the founder and managing director of Industry Ventures, which started all the way back in 2000 Industry Ventures is one of the pioneers in secondary market for venture capital, managing several billion cross assets, including LP stakes, direct secondaries, and primary investments. In October 2025, Goldman Sachs announced that they were going to acquire industry ventures in a deal worth over $900 million. Hans, welcome to World of DaaS.

**Hans Swildens** (0:52)
Thank you, Auren. I appreciate your time and being on your show.

**Auren Hoffman** (0:55)
I'm super excited. Now, you and I have been friends for a long time, and you've been doing venture secondaries for a really long time. When you started, it was nothing. It was super small. It was really tiny. There was almost nobody doing it. Last year, I think 70% of all VC exits were to secondaries. Walk me through that last 25 year transition.

**Hans Swildens** (1:15)
We started doing secondaries after the.com collapse in 2000 So we are one of the handful of first firms that were started to are dedicated to doing secondaries. So my background, as you know, is as an entrepreneur, I helped my brother start two software companies, the one that was the most successful was SpeedAero Networks. So when I came to the venture market, I came to it from the entrepreneurial side of the market. So when I looked at the venture business, I didn't want to just create a traditional venture fund because there was already hundreds of those. I wanted to look at how we're going to invest capital in a differentiated way and then have over time, pick a segment that we think could grow and help the market evolve. So when we started, it was nascent. Basically, all the transactions that were happening in the market were from corporate venture capital funds winding down, from some mutual funds selling some assets and some hedge funds liquidating.

**Auren Hoffman** (2:06)
The fund would have invested in, let's say, 30 deals, maybe 10 were still ongoing and they were like ragtag of some good ones, some really bad ones. And you'd buy that remaining fund from these corporate venture capital firms.

**Hans Swildens** (2:20)
Most of the portfolios that we bought were built in 1997 to 2000, the bulk of it being 1999-2000 investments, because that's when the corporate venture funds went from being 100

**Auren Hoffman** (2:33)
And I assume because of that, many of them were underwater because of the dot-com crash.

**Hans Swildens** (2:37)
I would say the beginning of the secondary market for venture investments was a distressed opportunity. The portfolios were distressed.

**Auren Hoffman** (2:44)
And they just wanted to wind down the fund. They were just like, okay, we don't need to do this anymore. We're ex-firm and we actually make money selling software, selling widgets or selling consumer packaged goods. We don't need this venture capital arm anymore.

**Hans Swildens** (2:57)
The companies themselves got distressed too. The corporate entities got distressed and their portfolios got distressed. And then the whole venture market was distressed and then liquidity disappeared. The whole venture market became a distressed market. So the transactions that we were buying were all distressed portfolios from distressed sellers. There were some interesting nuggets in these portfolios and companies that ended up being great successful businesses. But at the time, we were acquiring them. It was more of a counterintuitive value investing strategy of going into the market looking for distressed deals from distressed sellers with some good assets, but most of the assets were also distressed.

**Auren Hoffman** (3:35)
How big was this? I imagine the market was really tiny back then, the secondary market.

**Hans Swildens** (3:40)
The first couple of years, there was only a couple hundred million dollars per year that was traded. Most of it was in portfolios and most of that was in corporate venture fund portfolios. There were a couple of mutual funds, a couple of hedge funds, but there were about 30 different corporate venture funds that sold their portfolios in a two to three year period. And the pricing was really poor. The pricing went down to 10 cents in the dollar, 20 cents in the dollar, 30, 40 cents in the dollar. So people were taking 60 to 90 percent losses on their cost. And that's just a very distressed time. Some of the companies went bankrupt too. It was the time when you had Tyco and Williams Communications and Enron and MCI, WorldCom. And we had a lot of different companies that were going through bankruptcy processes as well that previously started up venture portfolios.