In a rapidly evolving venture capital landscape, Jared Carmel of Manhattan Venture Partners (MVP) stands out as a visionary who anticipated and then actively shaped the institutionalization of the secondaries market. For over a decade, MVP has been at the forefront of building the critical infrastructure necessary for this market to become a core component of how the U.S. venture ecosystem funds and sustains its most ambitious, long-lived, and high-growth companies. This strategic shift is not merely about providing liquidity; it is about enabling American innovation, particularly in sectors vital for national security and economic competitiveness, to thrive over extended development cycles.
The Genesis of a Market: Reading the Tape Before Anyone Else Did
Jared Carmel’s journey into the venture capital world began under challenging circumstances, graduating into the tail end of the dot-com bust, just weeks before the seismic events of September 11, 2001. This period, marked by economic uncertainty and a profound reassessment of technology valuations, instilled a crucial lesson: markets are cyclical, and patterns, though often forgotten, inevitably repeat. Carmel observed how sectors like SPACs, telecom infrastructure, and clean technology, once written off by the industry, would eventually re-emerge years later, proving the enduring nature of fundamental market dynamics. This early exposure to market volatility and the eventual resurgence of undervalued assets honed his ability to identify nascent trends with long-term potential.
A pivotal moment arrived in late 2009. The venture landscape was still recovering from the global financial crisis, and the concept of a "secondary market" for private company shares was virtually non-existent. At this time, a friend at Facebook, preparing to leave the company for marriage, sought to sell some of his early-stage shares. Carmel seized the opportunity, acquiring these shares at a valuation that, in retrospect, was incredibly modest. While he humorously admits to no longer owning those specific shares, the transaction itself was revelatory. It highlighted an unmet need: a mechanism for early employees and investors in promising private companies to realize liquidity without forcing a premature public offering. "This was before the secondary markets were even a market," Carmel recounts, "before people knew it existed."
This initial transaction sparked a broader endeavor. Carmel began systematically providing liquidity to early employees at other high-growth private companies, including social media giant Twitter and data analytics firm Palantir. His expertise in navigating these uncharted waters led him to G Squared, a firm known for its focus on growth-stage investments. By 2014, with a firm conviction that the burgeoning secondary market required a robust, institutional framework, he co-founded Manhattan Venture Partners. The vision was clear: to build a secondary market operation founded on the same rigorous diligence, discipline, and underwriting standards as any top-tier primary venture capital firm, thereby legitimizing and professionalizing a previously fragmented and often opaque corner of the financial world.
An Industry Evolving for Longer Journeys: The Rise of Patient Capital
The last decade has witnessed a profound, albeit often quiet, transformation within the American venture industry. The fundamental reality driving this evolution is that the companies founders are now building demand significantly longer maturation periods. It is no longer uncommon to find some of the largest private companies existing as private entities for well over a decade, with some even approaching their twentieth year without having gone public. This extended lifecycle represents a departure from earlier eras where rapid IPOs were the norm.
Contrary to popular misconception, Carmel asserts that this trend is not a symptom of market distress or a "closed IPO window" due to unfavorable public market conditions. Instead, he posits a more optimistic interpretation: "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 suggests that founders are tackling more complex, harder problems—innovations that require deeper capital, longer R&D cycles, and sustained strategic focus unburdened by quarterly public market pressures.
Data supports this assertion. According to PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor reports, the median age of U.S. venture-backed companies at IPO has steadily increased over the past two decades. In the early 2000s, companies typically went public within 4-6 years of their founding. By the 2010s, this number climbed to 7-10 years, and today, it often exceeds 10-12 years, with many high-profile "unicorns" and "decacorns" remaining private for even longer. This extended private runway is facilitated by a dramatically expanded and more sophisticated private capital market.
What has emerged in response is a more flexible and robust capital stack within the venture ecosystem. This includes not only the traditional primary venture capital but also a significant growth in late-stage private equity, corporate venture capital, sovereign wealth funds, and, crucially, a highly institutionalized secondary market. Together, these diverse sources of capital provide the patient, long-horizon funding that multi-decade journeys demand. This capital stack allows companies to access significant funding rounds while retaining operational control and focusing on long-term value creation rather than short-term public market expectations. Even the nature of IPOs has evolved; it’s increasingly common to see a substantial secondary component within public listings, allowing early investors and employees to realize liquidity as part of the IPO itself, a quiet but powerful indicator of the mainstream acceptance and utility of secondary transactions.
Why Secondaries Matter to the Innovation Economy: Beyond Liquidity
For many years, the secondaries market was viewed as a niche, often esoteric, corner of venture capital—sometimes associated with distressed assets or fund rebalancing. Jared Carmel was among the earliest proponents to argue that this perception was short-sighted and that secondaries would become something far more central to the industry’s ability to foster American innovation. His conviction has proven prescient, with the market growing exponentially in recent years. According to industry reports from firms like Setter Capital and Greenhill, the global secondary market volume for private equity and venture capital reached record highs in recent years, often exceeding $100 billion annually, with venture secondaries making up an increasingly significant portion. This surge underscores its growing importance and acceptance among institutional investors.
The rationale behind the burgeoning importance of secondaries is straightforward and multifaceted. When a company is genuinely committed to building for the long term, every additional year spent privately allows for compounding capability – further product development, market penetration, and strategic refinement without the intense scrutiny and quarterly pressures of public markets. A robust and accessible secondary market grants these companies the crucial gift of time.
- For Founders and Companies: Secondaries enable founders to maintain control and pursue their long-term vision, avoiding premature public offerings that could compromise strategic initiatives. It also ensures healthy cap tables by allowing early investors and employees to realize gains without necessitating a company-wide liquidity event. This flexibility is invaluable for attracting and retaining top talent, as employees can gain liquidity from their equity grants without having to wait for an uncertain IPO date.
- For Early Investors: It provides a critical mechanism for portfolio management. Early-stage venture funds, which typically have a 10-12 year lifecycle, can use secondaries to realize returns from successful investments that are taking longer to exit via IPO or M&A. This allows them to return capital to their limited partners (LPs) and free up resources for new investments, maintaining a healthy fund recycling dynamic.
- For Late-Stage Investors (Secondary Buyers): Institutional secondary buyers gain access to a curated portfolio of mature, high-growth private companies, often at attractive valuations. This allows them to participate in the growth of leading companies with potentially shorter holding periods compared to primary venture investments, and often with more diversified exposure.
Carmel emphasizes, "Secondaries are not just supporting the venture ecosystem. They are becoming a key pillar of the venture ecosystem." This transformation from a niche transaction to a foundational element reflects a maturation of the entire private capital landscape, recognizing that liquidity management is crucial for all stakeholders in a long-duration asset class like venture capital.
Supporting the Companies America Needs: A Strategic Imperative
Beyond the financial mechanics, there is a deeper, more profound question regarding these long-horizon companies: what exactly are they building, and why do they warrant such sustained private investment? Jared Carmel’s answer points directly to sectors of critical importance to the nation: artificial intelligence, defense, space, supply chain resilience, and frontier compute. These are not industries characterized by quick wins or short development cycles. They represent twenty-year journeys, and many of them carry significant implications for national security, economic competitiveness, and societal well-being.
The necessity of investing in these strategic sectors was starkly illuminated by the COVID-19 pandemic and its ensuing supply-chain shocks. The inability of the United States to reliably source essential medications or N95 masks exposed a quiet but alarming reality: the country had outsourced critical strategic capabilities it could not afford to be without. This crisis crystallized a trend Carmel had observed for years – a gradual erosion of domestic capacity in vital areas. The companies now emerging to rebuild and fortify this capacity share a common profile: they require deep capital, exceptional technical talent, and, crucially, a willingness to plan in decades rather than quarters.
- Artificial Intelligence: The foundational technology of the 21st century, AI development requires massive computational resources, extensive data sets, and long-term research—often years before commercialization. Ensuring U.S. leadership in AI is paramount for economic and military advantage.
- Defense and Space: These sectors involve complex, capital-intensive projects with extensive regulatory hurdles and long procurement cycles. Companies building next-generation defense technologies or space infrastructure need patient capital and a stable environment to innovate.
- Supply Chain Resilience: Re-shoring critical manufacturing, diversifying supply networks, and building robust logistics infrastructure are multi-year endeavors that demand significant investment and strategic foresight.
- Frontier Compute: Areas like quantum computing, advanced materials, and next-generation biotechnologies represent fundamental scientific breakthroughs that require sustained R&D, often without immediate commercial returns.
"The companies are going to need to build longer because they have more to build," Carmel states, encapsulating the scale and complexity of these undertakings. This last requirement—the willingness to plan in decades—is the one the venture industry has had to grow into most significantly. For MVP, supporting these founders extends far beyond merely writing a check. It involves an active partnership, a commitment to staying alongside them through the long, often difficult, middle phases of a company’s journey, when validation may be distant and the work is hardest.
This translates into tangible support: making strategic board introductions with deep expertise in critical sectors like defense and national security, connecting companies with operating leaders who possess the experience to scale complex organizations, and demonstrating an unwavering willingness to remain invested and engaged through challenging periods. "Being helpful isn’t pushing a transaction," Carmel emphasizes. "It’s being the person the founder calls before they decide whether they need one." This consultative, long-term partnership approach is vital for companies tackling problems of national significance.
Why He’s Optimistic: Sustaining the Flow of Innovation
When asked what fuels his enduring commitment to this demanding work, Jared Carmel offers two primary reasons. The first is deeply personal: the remarkable privilege of spending his career delving into a dozen companies annually, learning directly from the visionary individuals who are building the future. This intellectual engagement and constant learning are powerful motivators.
The second reason is rooted in a broader perspective on the country’s trajectory. "Technology is being built by more people than at any other moment in my career," he observes. This widespread entrepreneurial energy, coupled with a renewed focus on strategic industries, paints a picture of immense potential. His work, and MVP’s mission, is to ensure that this surge of innovation is adequately supported by capital. "Our job is to keep capital flowing in a way that matches that reality."
This is the compelling case for the U.S. venture industry, articulated by a leader who has witnessed its cycles of booms and resets. The companies American founders are building today are often more capital-intensive and demand a longer horizon than those of a generation ago. The industry, through the evolution and institutionalization of markets like secondaries, has adapted to meet these new demands. The ongoing work involves not just identifying these transformative companies, but crucially, ensuring that patient, strategic capital continues to flow to them through every stage of their challenging, yet ultimately essential, journeys. Manhattan Venture Partners, under Carmel’s leadership, remains a vital part of this critical endeavor, helping to secure the financial backbone for America’s future innovation.
