Modern Capital: The Private Markets Podcast

Luke Flemmer: The Private Markets Inflection Point

Markets don't just happen. They're built. Public markets weren't a completely organic development. They were engineered over centuries, through boom and design and crisis. Every layer of trust investors now take for granted: the information rights, the settlement rails and the benchmarks, all came from people who did the work and built them. Luke Flemmer is one of those people.  He runs private assets at MSCI. His central point: private markets are at the very start of that work. Private used to be the spice. Now it's the main dish. Institutional portfolios hold between 20 and 50 percent in private assets. The allocations scaled fast, but the infrastructure underneath them did not. Most people picture private equity as a guy in a vest in Midtown. Most of it is actually pension money. It is individual savers and capital managed on behalf of regular people. Private capital is public capital. Bad information flow is intrinsically value destructive. It slows the market and shrinks returns for the people these institutions serve. In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Luke and Marc cover: * Asset-level benchmarks: why investors need to see exposure across funds, not just inside them * Daily nowcasting indexes for PE and private credit - closing the gap between quarterly marks and real value * The classification problem: the industry still can't agree on what to call things (and what that costs) * Why information asymmetry in private markets is mostly underdevelopment, not design, and why closing that gap doesn't harm returns * How AI lets firms leapfrog data infrastructure gaps and what separates the institutions that will author that shift from those that absorb it "You need some degree of transparency to drive more robust price formation. Once you start to drive price formation, you start to drive liquidity. Once you start to drive liquidity, you kick off this data flywheel." Markets get built by people who decide to build them.

Chris Sparenberg: The Raw Materials of Private Markets

S&P Global built the information layer for public markets. Private markets is next. In 1860, Henry Varnum Poor published a manual on American railroads to inform investors. That business became Standard and Poor’s. The mission then was the same as it is now: build the information infrastructure for a market that is scaling faster than anyone can track. Private markets is the current assignment. The problem: a market that cannot measure itself. Performance data arrives in PDFs. Every manager reports differently. There is no agreed taxonomy, no standard for comparison.  More data is flowing through private markets than ever before... and almost none of it is comparable. Chris Sparenberg started his career at Cambridge Associates building private markets benchmarks from the ground up. He’s now Head of Private Markets Strategy and GTM at S&P Global Market Intelligence - and he’s spent his entire career in private markets data, technology and analytics. In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Chris and Marc cover: * The work S&P Global has done with Cambridge Associates and Mercer to create a new taxonomy [https://www.spglobal.com/market-intelligence/en/solutions/resources/expanded-taxonomy-for-private-markets-report-request?utm_medium=PMFPodcast&utm_source=LinkedIn&utm_campaign=WS-2603-ES-IBPE-GL-TaxonomyWP] and performance analytics for private markets * Why more data is creating more complexity, not less * The GP/LP disclosure challenge and how it's quietly resolving * The role played by iLEVEL as a data clearinghouse, which allows GPs to report to their LPs on a one-to-many basis * Why we're in the second inning (and what separates the firms already building from the ones just arriving) "We want to be in the raw materials business. We want to collect data at the atomic level, enrich it, make it useful to our clients, but also really give them the tools to use it as they need to."

Samir Kaji: How Everyone Can Invest Like an Institution

The next decade belongs to people who can think like institutions. Individual investors sit at 1-2% alternatives allocations. Institutions are at 20%. That gap is closing fast because the infrastructure to bridge it is finally being built. Samir Kaji spent 22 years watching that infrastructure not exist. Thirteen years at Silicon Valley Bank. Nine at First Republic. Both now gone. What he saw inside them is what convinced him the problem was never access. It was everything underneath access: the portfolio construction tools, the liquidity mechanisms, and the frameworks institutions take for granted and individuals don't have. That's what Allocate is built to fix. Four and a half years in, over $4 billion has moved through its pipes, connecting wealth advisors to private funds across venture, private equity and private credit. 360 advisor firms. 4,000 individual investors.  In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Samir and Marc cover: * Why "semi-liquid" isn't the same as liquid, and what actually happens when individuals need out * The barbell: why large funds and emerging managers are playing completely different games, and how to build across both * What institutional portfolio construction actually looks like, and why accredited doesn't mean ready * Where private markets are heading and what has to be true for individuals to actually benefit "It's a way to generate alpha, but only if you get it right. So, let's build the system for that." Private markets are heading past $30 trillion. The wealth channel infrastructure to deliver them responsibly is being built right now. This is the conversation behind it.

Thomas McHugh: Building One Language for All of Finance

Finance speaks a thousand languages. Every market data provider formats corporate actions differently. Every custodian speaks a different dialect. Something as simple as receiving a dividend (ten shares of one company) might involve five custodians, six venues, three providers of corporate actions and ten investors across five different share classes, each with different tax obligations. "Something that sounds incredibly trivial turns into this web of really complicated translation problems." Thomas McHugh spent fifteen years inside that problem. Network engineering at Morgan Stanley, Monte Carlo engines for complex derivatives, running quant development and front office risk at RBS through and after 2008.  He co-founded FINBOURNE to solve it: one platform that speaks every language finance has invented, across every asset class. It raised one of the largest Series B rounds in UK fintech history. In this episode of The Modern Capital Podcast, Thomas and Marc cover: * Why a single trade record has five different dates and how one record replaces five systems * Why blockchain can't solve books and records: it only moves forward, can't restate history and everyone wants it private anyway * The three layers of the AI stack in finance: why the UI layer is dead, who wins orchestration and where the real moat lives * Why 60-80% of AI proof of concepts never reach production - and the permissions gap nobody is solving * The SaaSpocalypse: why single-feature vertical SaaS is at genuine risk and what survives it Get the translation layer right and AI works. Get it wrong and the proof of concept never reaches production. Thomas has spent a decade building the former.

Kelly Rodriques: The Private Markets Moment We're In

Go to Yahoo Finance. Search SpaceX. You'll find a price.  That number comes from Forge. Private markets are the fastest-growing part of institutional finance, and they've never had what public markets took fifty years to build: reliable price discovery, standardized custody, a trading infrastructure that works at scale. Kelly Rodriques spent his career positioning as the infrastructure layer of industries at their inflection points. And in 2018, he took over a Y Combinator trading platform, rebranded it Forge and set out to build all three simultaneously. In July 2025, he demoed the next-generation platform to the ten largest financial institutions in the country. Several came back wanting to buy the company. One sent Chuck Schwab himself to take the meeting. In this episode, Kelly and Marc cover: * The price discovery gap: why none of the funds currently packaging private shares are anchored to underlying NAV and why that should alarm every allocator watching this space * The 401(k) moment: an executive order opened $18 trillion in retirement savings to private markets, and the infrastructure to absorb it is still being built * The civic case: 8,000 public companies in 1999, 4,000 today - and why restricting private markets to accredited investors is an inequality problem * PISCES: why global exchanges are racing to know private companies before they go public "In the early 70s, we set out to democratize investing. And we've been watching you for a couple of years, and you're democratizing the private markets." Chuck Schwab said that to Kelly Rodriques in a conference room in 2025.  When Chuck Schwab buys your company, democratization stops being a vision. It becomes an obligation.