Why 401ks Will Access Private Markets | Davis Thacker

Davis Thacker (0:00)

A decade from now, I would be shocked if we don't see 401Ks be available to invest in private assets.

SPEAKER_2 (0:04)

Like retirement.

Davis Thacker (0:05)

Yeah, I would be shocked if that wasn't the case. Within the next year, I think the big thing that we're seeing across the board is more LP secondaries. I think that'll be a predominant form of liquidity that you see in private market.

SPEAKER_3 (0:17)

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to MTS. I am joined again by another guest.

SPEAKER_2 (0:23)

We have Davis Thacker here, who is the Chief Strategy Officer at Carta. Today is an exciting day, and I did want to give a huge shout out to our New York Stock Exchange collaborator, partners, Kevin Hawking. He invited our team at MTS to join them today on the floor.

SPEAKER_3 (0:39)

You can see our cool logo here. We actually get to be live on the floor, which is pretty exciting.

SPEAKER_2 (0:45)

And I'm very lucky because today we're joined by Davis, who is also doing some partnerships with the New York Stock Exchange. So tell me a little bit about what Carta is doing with the New York Stock Exchange. Yeah.

Davis Thacker (0:54)

Well, thank you so much for having us on. It's a pleasure to be here. It's always fun to be on the on the NYSEE forum. I know, we made it. And the logo. Yeah, it's so cool. No, NYSEE has been a great partner for us for the past couple of years. One of the main initiatives that we've been trying to do over the past couple of years is really help companies transition from when they're going private to going public, really making sure that they have the right infrastructure and the right partners to make that transition properly. So we've gone to market with a couple of partners that we think are best to breed in their categories. Morgan Stanley for plan management, NYSEE being the exchange partner and Odyssey being the TA. And NYSEE has just been a great partner. I mean, you look at the infrastructure that they bring here, the media assets that they have, and just the history of this building and this exchange.

It's really powerful. And I think any startup, any pre-IPO company that wants to come here, they're blown away by the kind of magnitude of it. It's really cool.

SPEAKER_2 (1:44)

Yeah. And you're going to be now part of this process and what it actually means to go public. I know NYSEE is one of the main partners that these startups and companies talk to. But Carta is now increasingly more and more in that position. I think a lot of our audience is probably familiar with Carta, especially anyone who works in the startup space about, okay, this is the tool I use to manage my equity. But I know you guys are expanding a lot beyond that. And we'll touch on that in a second. But what I wanted to get your perspective on is, you guys, for your entire existence, you're able to pull in so much information and data about what is kind of happening at a macro level when it comes to the state of the market, and when it comes to when companies are going public, when they're getting acquired, how is equity actually getting diffused to different employees? And so tell me a little bit about what you're learning at the macro level.

Davis Thacker (2:30)

I mean, there are so many macro things that are happening right now. I mean, the first thing that I'll mention is obviously there's a big backlog of companies that are looking to go public right now, and there's a lot of uncertainty in the market. Mainly people are just waiting for Anthropic and then OpenAI to go public, and people will make their decisions off of that. I mean, you saw that with Aura earlier, and I think a lot of other companies are in a similar position. But there are still a lot of really quality companies with really quality metrics looking at where they go public. I think the big question in the market is, what's the appetite for a IPO that's not a $2 trillion IPO? What's the appetite for a $10, $50 billion IPO? And I think that's the big question in the market right now. Back in Ventureland, I think we're seeing some really interesting things as well. We're seeing more shutdowns than ever. We're seeing more acquisitions than ever. And we're seeing kind of a dichotomy in how the market is happening in terms of where rounds are getting done. We're seeing less rounds than pretty much past six years or so, I'd say basically at kind of like 2020 levels, in terms of the number of rounds that are getting done. But in terms of the overall amount of fundraising, it's about near like almost the highs of what we saw in 2021 So it's lots of capital being concentrated in fewer and fewer companies.