The venture capital landscape has undergone a profound transformation over the past decade, shifting from a model traditionally focused on rapid exits to one that increasingly supports companies on longer, more complex journeys. At the forefront of this evolution stands Jared Carmel, co-founder of Manhattan Venture Partners (MVP), a firm that has dedicated over a decade to building the institutional bedrock for the burgeoning secondaries market. This market, once a niche corner of venture finance, has emerged as a core pillar in how the industry funds and sustains high-growth American enterprises, particularly those tackling critical, long-horizon challenges.
A Market Vision Forged in Economic Turmoil
Jared Carmel’s journey into the venture capital world began under challenging circumstances, graduating into the tail end of the dot-com bust in 2001, just weeks before the September 11th attacks. This period instilled in him a critical understanding: markets are cyclical, and patterns, though often dismissed, tend to repeat. Lessons from the collapse of dot-coms, the subsequent resurgence of telecom infrastructure, and the cyclical nature of clean tech investments would shape his unique perspective on market dynamics and undervalued opportunities.
A pivotal moment arrived in late 2009, a time when the concept of liquidity for private company shares was virtually non-existent outside of direct, ad-hoc transactions. A friend, an early employee at Facebook, was getting married and leaving the company, seeking to sell some of his shares. Carmel seized the opportunity, acquiring the shares at a mere few dollars apiece. While he readily admits to no longer holding those particular shares – a decision he humorously reflects on – the transaction itself was a revelation. "This was before the secondary markets were even a market," Carmel recounts. "Before people knew it existed."
This singular transaction opened a door to an unmet need. Carmel began systematically providing liquidity to early employees at then-private tech giants such as Facebook, Twitter, and Palantir. This pioneering work eventually led him to G Squared, a firm known for its growth equity investments. By 2014, Carmel’s conviction in the necessity of institutionalizing this nascent market had solidified. He co-founded Manhattan Venture Partners with the explicit mission to establish the secondaries market on principles of rigorous diligence, discipline, and underwriting standards — mirroring the professionalism expected of any leading primary venture capital firm. This foresight would prove prescient, as the industry increasingly recognized the strategic importance of a robust secondary market.
The Era of Longer Journeys: Redefining Company Maturity
The traditional venture capital playbook, which often anticipated a public offering within 5-7 years of significant investment, has been largely rewritten. The American venture industry has quietly adapted over the last decade to a new reality: the companies founders are now building demand significantly longer maturation periods. It is no longer uncommon for some of today’s largest private companies to be in their second decade of existence as privately held entities.
Carmel posits that this extended private runway is not a symptom of distress or a "closed IPO window" due to unfavorable public markets. On the contrary, he argues, "The IPO window is not closed because the markets are bad. The markets are great. It is closed because companies don’t need to go public to keep building." This perspective challenges conventional wisdom, suggesting that the prolonged private phase is a deliberate choice by founders who are tackling more ambitious, harder problems, and that the venture ecosystem has evolved to support these protracted development cycles.
This adaptation has manifested in the emergence of a more sophisticated and flexible capital stack. This new financial architecture integrates secondary markets, growth equity, and a diverse base of late-stage investors, collectively providing the patient, long-horizon capital essential for supporting these multi-decade journeys. The growing presence of secondary capital within IPOs themselves – where existing shareholders sell a portion of their holdings during the public listing – is a subtle yet significant indicator of how fundamentally the public listing event has transformed. It underscores the embedded role secondaries now play, even at the point of market debut.
Secondaries: A Pillar of the Innovation Economy
For many years, the secondaries market was largely relegated to the periphery of venture capital, often viewed as an opportunistic or distress-driven activity. Jared Carmel was among the earliest and most vocal proponents arguing that this market would inevitably become central to the industry’s capacity to foster American innovation. That conviction has not only aged well but has become a widely accepted truth. "Secondaries are not just supporting the venture ecosystem. They are becoming a key pillar of venture ecosystem," Carmel asserts.
The rationale behind this ascent is straightforward and compelling. When a company is genuinely committed to building for the long term, every additional year spent as a private entity translates into another year of compounding capability, shielded from the short-term pressures of public markets. A robust secondary market grants these companies precious time. It enables early employees and initial investors to realize liquidity from their holdings without compelling the company into a premature public offering before its business model, market position, or operational scale are truly ready. This mechanism helps maintain healthy capitalization tables, preventing "dead money" scenarios where early investors are locked in indefinitely. Furthermore, it allows new long-horizon investors to inject fresh capital and renewed conviction precisely when a company most requires reinforcement to navigate its next phase of growth. Ultimately, this flexibility empowers founders to continue building towards the kind of category-defining outcomes that the U.S. venture industry has historically championed.
Supporting Strategic Sectors: The Companies America Needs
Beyond merely extending timelines, the deeper question for observers of the venture industry is what these long-horizon companies are actually building. Carmel’s answer points directly to the critical sectors where MVP primarily focuses its investments: artificial intelligence, defense, space, supply chain resilience, and frontier compute. These are not companies designed for a three-year flip, nor even a ten-year horizon. They represent twenty-year journeys, often carrying profound implications for national security and economic competitiveness.
"The companies are going to need to build longer because they have more to build," Carmel explains, highlighting the inherent complexity and scale of these undertakings. His personal conviction on this matter solidified during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in the wake of the supply-chain shock when the United States struggled to reliably source essential medications and N95 masks. This crisis crystallized a trend he had observed for years: the quiet outsourcing of strategic capabilities that the nation could ill afford to lose.
The companies now emerging to rebuild and fortify these critical capacities share a common profile. They demand substantial, deep capital infusions, a concentration of highly specialized technical talent, and an unwavering willingness to plan in decades rather than quarterly financial reports. This last requirement, in particular, has necessitated a significant evolution within the venture industry itself. Showing up for these founders is no longer simply a matter of writing a check; it involves an enduring commitment to stand alongside them through long stretches of difficult, often unglamorous, work.
Carmel emphasizes that true helpfulness transcends transactional thinking. "Being helpful isn’t pushing a transaction. It’s being the person the founder calls before they decide whether they need one." For MVP, this translates into tangible support: facilitating introductions to board members with deep expertise in critical sectors like defense and national security, connecting companies with experienced operating leaders capable of scaling complex organizations, and demonstrating a steadfast willingness to remain invested through the arduous "long middle" of a company’s journey – a period when the work is most challenging and public validation often feels furthest away.
A Foundation of Optimism for American Innovation
When asked about the driving force behind his continued dedication, Carmel offers a two-fold answer. The first is deeply personal: he finds immense satisfaction and privilege in spending his career immersing himself in a dozen or so companies annually, constantly learning from the visionary individuals who are building them. The second, broader answer centers on the nation itself.
"Technology is being built by more people than at any other moment in my career. Our job is to keep capital flowing in a way that matches that reality," Carmel states with conviction. This encapsulates the contemporary case for the U.S. venture industry, articulated by an individual who has witnessed its cycles of booms, busts, and profound resets. The companies American founders are creating today are, by and large, more ambitious, longer-horizon, and more capital-intensive than those of a generation ago. The venture industry, through the likes of MVP and the institutionalization of markets like secondaries, has demonstrably adapted to meet these demands. The ongoing mission, therefore, is to ensure that capital continues to flow efficiently and effectively to these critical companies through every stage of their challenging, yet ultimately transformative, journeys.
Manhattan Venture Partners, as a key member of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), embodies this forward-looking approach, playing a vital role in shaping an ecosystem capable of supporting the next generation of American innovation.
