Michael Gruener: Asset Management's Third Wave (and What Will Break It)

Amit Gairola & Griff Norville: Customer Obsession Comes to Private Markets

Private markets grew for decades without obsessing over the investor experience.  A few hundred GP names mattered, and they competed on one number: returns. There was no pressure to care about reporting quality, data timeliness, or what it felt like to be on the receiving end of a quarterly PDF. That era is over. Amit Gairola spent a decade at Amazon, where every decision came back to one question: what does this do for the customer? He brought that question to private markets and built Daphne, a permissioned data layer that makes straight-through data processing possible between GPs and the allocators, platforms and fund of funds that invest with them. Griff Norville is Co-Head of Innovation at Hamilton Lane, one of the largest allocators in private markets with roughly $1 trillion in assets under management and supervision - and both a backer and live user of Daphne. He's watched the industry evolve from one where delivering returns was enough, to one where a new class of investors brings expectations formed by public markets, consumer technology and the Amazon-era assumption that a good experience is simply the baseline. The problem they're solving is not subtle. "The uncomfortable truth in this industry — for all the growth we've had and the improvements that we've made — is that we still operate with PDFs and emails and cumbersome data rooms." In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Amit, Griff, and Marc cover: * Why private markets built its infrastructure around documents instead of data and why that logic no longer holds * The difference between data extraction and straight-through processing, and what closing that gap actually requires * Why standardization keeps failing - and why AI-powered translation may make it irrelevant * How evergreen funds moving from quarterly to daily valuations are making the current system untenable * What 401(k) access and secondary market growth require from data infrastructure before either can scale Private markets has to start treating its investors like customers. Delivering a great LP experience is becoming the new standard, and the infrastructure to make it possible is only now being built.

Michael Gruener: Asset Management's Third Wave (and What Will Break It)

The mutual fund put investing in the hands of ordinary savers. The ETF made it cheaper, faster and borderless. Both transformed asset management. Both also required infrastructure that didn't exist when the product arrived.  Private markets are wave three. And the infrastructure problem is bigger this time. Michael Gruener lived through both of the first two: mutual funds at Goldman in the early 2000s and ETFs at BlackRock through the iShares expansion across Eastern Europe and the Middle East. He knows what a category-defining shift looks like from the inside. And he knows what breaks when the rails are not ready. Now, as co-CEO of Titanbay, he's building the infrastructure for wave three before it breaks. In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Michael and Marc cover: * Why the semi-liquid evergreen fund is the ETF of private markets - and why the infrastructure underneath it is not ready * The "know your client, know your trade" problem - and why today's trade rails were built to do the opposite * What an 8% NIGO rate looks like when a model portfolio rebalance triggers 100,000 trades in a single day * Why the fix is faster than the industry expects - and why it comes down to 24 names * How Titanbay connects to distributors in whatever format they have, applies private market logic, and hands back a trade in good order * Where the boundaries between public and private markets are heading - and the one condition that has to be met first "That trade infrastructure was not built for this product... It was built for the industry as it existed in 1996, when I started at Goldman. Nobody went back and rebuilt it." Wave three is already in motion. This is a conversation about what it breaks on the way through.

Jake Walker: Money in Motion, at Scale

Private markets have solved origination. The products are built. The constraint now is a wealth management tech stack built for mutual funds and ETFs that cannot run semi-liquid products at scale. Jake Walker is Partner and COO of Client & Product Solutions at Apollo, where the wealth distribution build he has spent five years running has gone from zero to more than $17 billion in annual channel raises. Private markets are joining the $147 trillion world of traditional asset management. The infrastructure needed to carry them hasn't kept pace. His read: the fix costs $400 to $800 million spread across 50 to 70 endpoints. "Pennies for everybody," he says. But the problem isn't money. It's coordination. Every industry that hit this moment solved it the same way. The wealth management ecosystem never has.  In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Jake and Marc cover: * Why the wealth management stack breaks when semi-liquid products arrive at scale * How omnibus accounts could unlock distribution and what needs to be true for subscription documents to disappear * Apollo's push for estimated daily value across its entire credit book * The Netflix parallel: what Reed Hastings had to build before anyone could stream (and what private markets needs to build before it can distribute) * Whether asset managers become hardware providers or build the coalition that makes it unnecessary "I want the rail to be ubiquitous... we need it ubiquitous because I think if the market grows, our firms will grow. I will compete on brand, and content, and client service, and investment performance. I will not need to compete on how the infrastructure works." The money is in motion. The rails aren't ready. And the only path forward is a level of collaboration that this industry has never been forced to attempt before.

Ben Haber: The Omnibus Unlock

The wealth channel buildout everyone in private markets is betting on has a plumbing problem. Evergreen funds are growing fast. Roughly 300 products, ~$550 billion in AUM and demand from wealth platforms that is real and accelerating. These vehicles are designed to bring private markets within the reach of everyday portfolios, but the infrastructure underneath them was built for institutions writing $50M+ checks, not hundreds of thousands of investors at lower minimums. The NIGO rate (orders failing on documentation, compliance, or funding before they ever clear) sits at 8%. Every subscription flows bilaterally between advisor, custodian and transfer agent. At the scale this market needs to reach, that system breaks. Ben Haber is co-founder and CEO of Monark Markets. He started building it as a sophomore at NYU. On graduation day, he skipped the ceremony to close on the assets of a bankrupt fintech instead. That deal crystallized the thesis: private markets don’t need a better interface. They need better rails. His answer is omnibus: one account per fund per custodian, netting all orders rather than processing each one individually. The structure Schwab built for mutual funds with OneSource, applied to private markets. In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Ben and Marc cover: * Why the "Robinhood for alts" D2C wave failed and why competing with Fidelity and Schwab for the same customer was never going to work * Why evergreen funds cannot sit inside model portfolios without omnibus underneath them * How the pending paperwork crisis in private markets can be solved by simply removing the paperwork "One omnibus account per fund, per custodian... dramatically less than the hundreds of thousands or millions of individual accounts the transfer agent would need to record. A real ability to actually scale the evergreen fund market in a way that is simply not possible today." The wealth channel opportunity is well understood. This conversation is about what has to get built before it gets there.

Jason Wenk & Michael Miller: How to Serve More (and Serve Better) in Private Markets

There are fewer than 4,000 public companies in the United States. In the late 1990s, there were 8,000. The companies that left public markets didn't stop creating wealth. They simply stopped being accessible to ordinary investors.  The world’s most sophisticated institutional investors know this. The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, widely regarded as one of the global leaders in institutional investing, is 60% allocated to alternatives. The average high-net-worth individual is under 2%.  That gap isn't a knowledge problem. It's an infrastructure problem. Jason Wenk built Altruist to close it. Not with a new fund structure or a regulatory exemption, but by rebuilding the plumbing from scratch. He spent over a decade building middleware on top of legacy custodial infrastructure before concluding the ceiling was structural. In 2018, he stepped down and built a self-clearing custodian: one of the rarest things in financial services. Michael Miller came from Robinhood, where he worked on product strategy for brokerage and IPO access. At Altruist, he's building the private markets layer on top of that same infrastructure, working toward the thing the industry hasn't cracked: alternatives that move as fast as a public equity trade. In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Jason, Michael and Marc cover: * Why building a self-clearing custodian is harder than launching a rocket, and why the incumbents' inertia made it worth doing anyway * The subscription workflow that takes under 90 seconds and less than 10 clicks, and why that alone still shocks advisors who've spent 20 years in the industry * What happens to a model portfolio when public markets sell off 15% and the private side has a 30-to-60-day settlement window * Hazel, Altruist's AI tax agent, and how a product that does in two minutes what used to take a family office 10 people wiped out $120 billion in market cap in under 24 hours * Why "self-driving money" was never achievable with software alone (and why it might be achievable now) "You kind of go, hey, I want the people that I grew up with and the families I knew, I want them to be able to have a fighting chance. And you can't do that if the minimums are 20 times higher than how much capital they have." The infrastructure layer private markets has been missing is being built. The question is whether the industry can move fast enough to meet the demand that's already here.