In the dynamic and often opaque world of venture capital, certain individuals and firms distinguish themselves by anticipating shifts and building the infrastructure to support them. Jared Carmel of Manhattan Venture Partners (MVP) is one such figure, having spent over a decade meticulously constructing the institutional framework for what has become a pivotal component of the U.S. venture ecosystem: the secondaries market. This market, once a niche corner, has evolved into a core mechanism for funding and sustaining the long-lived, high-growth American companies that are increasingly defining the nation’s innovation landscape.
Anticipating Market Shifts: A Glimpse into Early Insights
Jared Carmel’s entry into the professional world coincided with a period of significant economic uncertainty, graduating in the immediate aftermath of the dot-com bust and just weeks before the September 11th attacks. This challenging environment, he reflects, offered invaluable lessons. Beyond merely understanding what pitfalls to avoid, Carmel internalized a deeper truth: markets operate in discernible cycles, and patterns, though sometimes dormant, inevitably re-emerge. Sectors once deemed defunct—from SPACs to telecom infrastructure and clean technology—have consistently returned to prominence, albeit in new forms, years after the industry had written them off. This foundational understanding of cyclical market behavior would prove crucial to his later endeavors.
A defining moment arrived in late 2009. A friend, then an employee at Facebook, was preparing for marriage and a career transition, necessitating the sale of some of his shares. Carmel seized the opportunity, acquiring these shares at a modest price. While he readily admits he no longer holds those particular shares, the transaction itself was a revelation, illuminating a previously unrecognized market inefficiency. At that time, the concept of a secondary market for private company shares was virtually non-existent, operating largely outside the awareness of the mainstream financial industry. "This was before the secondary markets were even a market. Before people knew it existed," Carmel recalls. This early, almost accidental, foray into secondary transactions provided him with a unique vantage point, revealing the nascent demand for liquidity among early employees and investors in rapidly appreciating private tech companies.
The Genesis of a Market: From Ad Hoc to Institutionalized
Following his initial Facebook transaction, Carmel began systematically providing liquidity to early employees at other burgeoning technology giants, including Twitter and Palantir. This informal network eventually led him to G Squared, a firm where he honed his expertise in private market transactions. By 2014, with a clear vision for the future of venture capital, Carmel co-founded Manhattan Venture Partners. His core conviction, which has since become a widely accepted principle across the industry, was that the secondaries market could no longer remain an ad-hoc, opportunistic endeavor. It required institutionalization, demanding the same rigorous diligence, disciplined investment strategy, and robust underwriting standards typically associated with established primary venture capital firms.
At the time, the secondary market was characterized by a lack of transparency, fragmented deal flow, and inconsistent valuation methodologies. Transactions often occurred on a bespoke basis, lacking the formal processes and investor protections common in public markets or even traditional private equity. MVP’s founding was predicated on addressing these systemic gaps, aiming to bring structure, professionalism, and scalability to a market segment poised for exponential growth. This proactive approach positioned MVP not just as a participant, but as a key architect in shaping the modern secondary landscape.
The Evolving Venture Landscape: Longer Journeys, Deeper Capital Stacks
The American venture industry has undergone a profound, albeit quiet, transformation over the past decade, adapting to a fundamental new reality: the companies founders are now building demand significantly longer maturation periods. It is no longer uncommon for some of the largest and most impactful private companies to exist as private entities for upwards of two decades before considering a public offering. This trend marks a significant departure from the typical 5-7 year journey to IPO that characterized earlier venture cycles.
Jared Carmel’s perspective on this phenomenon challenges conventional wisdom. He argues emphatically that this extended private tenure is not a harbinger of distress or a sign of "closed IPO windows" due to weak markets. On the contrary, he asserts, "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 viewpoint is increasingly echoed by industry analysts and data providers like PitchBook and NVCA, which consistently report rising median ages to IPO, now often exceeding 10-12 years for venture-backed firms. The reasons are multifaceted: an abundance of private capital, a desire for founders to retain control and focus on long-term strategy without quarterly public market pressures, and the increasing complexity and capital intensity of the problems these companies are solving.
In response to this evolution, a more sophisticated and flexible capital stack has emerged. This ecosystem now seamlessly integrates growth equity, a diverse array of late-stage investors, and, critically, a robust secondary market. Together, these capital sources provide the patient, long-horizon funding essential for companies embarking on multi-decade journeys. The increasing prevalence of secondary capital within IPOs themselves – where existing investors or employees sell shares as part of the public offering – serves as a subtle yet powerful indicator of how thoroughly the public listing event itself has evolved, no longer solely a primary capital raise but often a liquidity event for long-standing stakeholders.
Why Secondaries Matter: A Pillar of the Innovation Economy
For many years, the secondaries market was largely dismissed as a peripheral, opportunistic corner of venture capital, primarily serving distressed assets or niche liquidity needs. Jared Carmel was among the earliest and most vocal proponents arguing that secondaries would ascend to a far more central and strategic role in the industry’s capacity to foster American innovation. That conviction has proven remarkably prescient.
"Secondaries are not just supporting the venture ecosystem. They are becoming a key pillar of venture ecosystem," Carmel emphasizes. The rationale behind this assertion is straightforward and compelling. When a company is genuinely committed to long-term development and groundbreaking innovation, every additional year of private runway translates into another year of compounding capability. A robust and well-functioning secondary market grants these companies the invaluable gift of time.
This extended runway offers several critical benefits:
- Employee and Early Investor Liquidity: It allows early employees and initial investors to realize returns on their illiquid holdings without forcing the company into a premature or suboptimal public offering. This is crucial for attracting and retaining top talent, as it provides a pathway to financial reward well before an IPO.
- Healthy Cap Tables: Secondaries help maintain healthy capitalization tables by enabling early investors to exit, preventing "dead money" situations where long-term holders may lose enthusiasm or capacity to support the company. This opens doors for new long-horizon investors to inject fresh capital and conviction precisely when a company most needs reinforcement, perhaps for a new growth phase or a challenging R&D push.
- Founder Control and Vision: By reducing the pressure for early exits, secondaries empower founders to maintain greater control over their strategic direction, allowing them to focus on building toward the kind of category-defining outcomes that the U.S. venture industry has historically championed.
- Market Efficiency and Access: The institutionalization of secondaries has also democratized access to some of the world’s most promising private companies for a broader base of institutional investors who might not typically participate in early-stage primary rounds. The global venture secondary market has seen significant growth, with transaction volumes escalating consistently year-over-year, reflecting its increasing acceptance and importance.
Supporting the Companies America Needs: National Security and Economic Competitiveness
Beyond the mechanics of capital, a deeper question for observers of the venture industry revolves around the nature of the "long-horizon" companies currently being built. Jared Carmel’s answer points to the critical sectors where MVP primarily focuses its investments: artificial intelligence, defense, space, supply chain resilience, and frontier compute. These are not merely industries; they represent strategic imperatives for national security and economic competitiveness, and similar dynamics apply across many other vital sectors.
These companies, Carmel contends, are fundamentally different from the consumer tech darlings of previous eras. "The companies are going to need to build longer because they have more to build." Their ambitious missions require foundational scientific breakthroughs, complex engineering, and often, significant regulatory navigation. They are not three-year companies, nor even ten-year companies; they embody twenty-year journeys, with profound implications that extend far beyond quarterly earnings reports.
Carmel traces his own profound conviction on this matter back to the stark realities exposed by the COVID-19 supply-chain shock. The inability of the United States to reliably source essential medications or N95 masks during a national crisis crystallized a disturbing trend he had observed for years: the quiet outsourcing of strategic capabilities that the country could not afford to be without. The companies now emerging to rebuild and fortify this critical capacity share a common profile. They demand substantial, patient capital, attract and retain world-class technical talent, and, most importantly, require a willingness to plan in decades rather than mere quarters. Government initiatives, such as the CHIPS and Science Act and increased defense innovation funding, underscore the national recognition of these strategic imperatives, further validating the long-term investment thesis in these sectors.
The Evolving Role of the Venture Investor
The last requirement – the willingness to plan in decades – is perhaps the most significant adaptation the venture industry has had to embrace. Showing up for these founders, in this new paradigm, extends far beyond simply writing a check. It necessitates an unwavering commitment to staying alongside them through long stretches of difficult, often unglamorous, work.
For Jared Carmel and MVP, this translates into a deeply engaged, supportive partnership. "Being helpful isn’t pushing a transaction. It’s being the person the founder calls before they decide whether they need one." This philosophy emphasizes proactive, strategic support over transactional engagement. It means providing invaluable board introductions with deep expertise in critical sectors like defense and national security, connecting founders with seasoned operating leaders capable of scaling a rapidly growing company, and demonstrating an enduring willingness to remain invested through the arduous "long middle" of a company’s journey – the period when the work is hardest, validation is furthest away, and steadfast belief is most crucial. This approach positions the venture investor as a true strategic partner, not merely a financier.
A Foundation for Optimism
When asked what fuels his continued dedication to this demanding work, Jared Carmel offers a two-fold answer. Personally, he finds immense satisfaction in the privilege of immersing himself in a dozen companies each year, constantly learning from the visionary individuals who are building the future. On a broader scale, his optimism is firmly rooted in the state of the country’s innovation engine.
"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," he states. This sentiment forms the core argument for the enduring strength and adaptability of the U.S. venture industry, articulated by someone who has navigated multiple market booms and resets. The companies American founders are developing today are, by their very nature, often more long-horizon and capital-intensive than those of a generation past. Yet, the venture industry has demonstrably adapted to support them, with the institutionalized secondary market playing an increasingly vital role. Ensuring that capital continues to flow efficiently and effectively to these companies, through every stage of their ambitious journeys, remains the paramount work, securing America’s competitive edge and fostering a future built on groundbreaking innovation.
Manhattan Venture Partners, as a key member of the NVCA, continues to exemplify this forward-thinking approach, solidifying its position at the forefront of the evolving venture capital landscape.
