Why "Public" and "Private" Are the Wrong Categories for Thinking About Access to Cash Bending Spoons went public on Nasdaq on July 1, and the market did not wait around to make up its mind. Shares priced at $29, opened strong, and closed the first day up nearly 40%, valuing the Milan-based acquirer of AOL, Vimeo, Eventbrite, and a dozen other formerly-left-for-dead internet brands at roughly $25 billion.

Every few months at PEP name comes through that the rest of the market has not yet priced correctly yet. By the time everyone agrees it’s a great company, the price has already moved past the point where it’s a great deal. The window between those two moments is where the actual work happens, and it has less to do with access than you might think (access, after all, is at premium when “everyone” wants into the deal).

Secondary venture investing is harder than it looks. The asset class concentrates liquidity around a handful of genuinely great companies, which creates the illusion that picking winning secondaries is mostly about picking winning companies. It isn't. In practice, there are five distinct ways a secondary investment can go wrong. Each hurdle requires its own discipline to prevent. At PrePublic Equity Partners, our investment process is built around avoiding all five.

Two pieces of news this week that, taken together, say something bigger about where private markets are heading.

Value creation is staying private. Liquidity is learning to follow it as venture secondaries become a crucial on-ramp. For most of modern venture history, the script was straightforward: invest early, support the company, and wait for an IPO or acquisition to unlock returns. That script is now being rewritten as two powerful signals are converging.

After two years of a constrained exit environment, private-market liquidity is increasingly being delivered through secondaries and structured transactions, not traditional IPOs.