Investing Billions - E419: Venture Capital Has a Liquidity Crisis

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

Venture capital was designed around a relatively simple model: invest in a startup, help it grow, and eventually exit through an acquisition or IPO. David sits down with Benjamin Black Powerlaw Corp. (Nasdaq: PWRL), Akkadian Ventures, Ben invests in growth-stage technology companies while providing alternative liquidity to founders, employees, angel investors, and venture funds. In this episode, Ben and David unpack the evolution of the venture secondary market, why great companies staying private longer creates an entirely different opportunity set, how sophisticated investors price illiquid private-company shares, and why liquidity itself is becoming a critical piece of venture capital infrastructure. The result is a different way to think about private markets: the investment opportunity doesn't end after the primary financing round.

Venture capital has traditionally been reserved for high net worth individuals, institutional investors, but you think that's going to change. Why? The reason why we excluded so many people was really about paperwork. In the early days of venture was all about access to very fragile, opaque, and small companies that needed to be sophisticated investors how to write them. Today, the private companies that I'm underwriting are among the largest and most consequential enterprises on Earth. And a global network of investors are excited about trying to get access to these companies.

And for them, it's just a brutal problem. And all we've given them is a shadowy market of SBVs that they have to navigate. because where there is demand, structures will come up to meet that demand. And that's where we are today. This market's completely unregulated. Like the SEC has nothing to say about it. And so you have to think about it, we spent 40 years sort of protecting ordinary investors from the best performing asset class in modern history.

That's not really an investor protection. In the early 2000s, you had Amazon's IPO, Google's IPO. and venture investors or private investors oftentimes had a 10 to 50x and the public markets actually ended up doing much better if you had held that stock. What's behind that? The IPO market has changed massively.

Back in the day when I started, you'd go public with 30 million of revenue and have a $500 million market cap. I was seen at that point is the sort of next point in the creation of the company. and then public market investors who are able to participate in the incredible growth of those private companies. And we've got a whole system of mega funds and late stage businesses and sovereign wealth. They can keep these compounding, amazing companies private pretty much forever.

And that becomes like a moral problem. Like to cut out 90% of the world's investors from the best companies for decades is not what anyone had in mind when we created the private markets and the public markets. At Acadian, you did 875 secondary transactions. Why was there such an active secondary market in venture today? When I started doing secondaries back in the day, 2010, if you believe it or not, I'm an age myself here. It was obviously such a need to me.

And what's happened and why we have secondary markets, we look at venture in our little tiny bubble. But whenever in any other. other industry with private equity, reits, private credit, when the duration of the asset goes too long, investors have a problem. And every other market, once that duration problem got there, a secondary market was created. We are just going down the path of every other industry that's out there that has a private and public market. This ties back to early. earlier in the conversation where if companies are staying private longer because there's more capital, they don't have to go public early like the Amazon's of the Googles of the early 2000s.

Now you can stay private longer, but the problem is that the fun lives for the venture capital funds that invests in the early stage, they haven't gone longer. VCs, for all their talk about innovation and their claim to be innovative, providing innovation, have not innovated on their product, the product everyone sells. is a 10-year liquid fund. Now, I challenge you to go to any venture capital conference and ask the audience to raise your hand and say, does anyone believe that the 10-year fund

is going to actually end the 10th year? We're now in the world of infinite extensions because the time duration from investment to liquidity has gone so far beyond 10 years, it's kind of a joke. I'd argue that borders on fraud. Like, we're selling a product that we know is not going to work the way it's intended. And that's a real problem.

And that drives people away from venture capital. I talk to investors all the time who would like exposure of venture, but do not want to sign up for a 20-year fund. It's just gotten kind of ridiculous. This preference for non-blind pool funds or non-tenure funds isn't just retail investors or family offices. I've had multiple Ivy League endowments tell me that all things being equal, meaning same fees.

They rather be going into direct opportunities versus blind pool funds because they have this issue now of having unfunded liabilities on their balance sheet. We are in a bubble in our little venture capital bubble. And what we have to remember is that we are competing with a whole bunch of other asset classes for capital from institutional investors, right? And so many institutional investors who I talk to are so exhausted with the time duration of venture capital that they're just doing other things.

I'll tell you an actual story on this. One of our longtime LPs, when I went out to raise my sixth fund, he said, Ben, he said, in VC you guys think a 3x fund is a DPI, the 3x fund is win. But when it takes you, 11, 12 years to deliver 3x, it's not really that great.

I can much more reliably invest in a handful of lower middle market buyout funds and generate a 3x fund in a fraction of the time. And so he doesn't deploy at all to venture anymore. And it's those investors that I'm interested in bringing back into the industry. You did these 875 secondaries. When it comes to the secondary market, do you think that? it's now overheated, or do you think it's still underinvested in terms of versus the primary market in venture country? Back in 2012, even after 2002, like there was lots of situations

where I could find a good company and be the only better. But the sheer number of new entrance, like everyone, every Tom Dick and Harry, every sovereign wealth fund, every family office is now competing through the platforms that can make it easy to compete on. Like, high for forage or juice, your poison. Having those people in the market really makes it tough to get great pricing. The pricing that venture capital

needs when you have to buy common stock at a discount because it's inferior security and you have everyone that's just willing to buy common stock at the last round price or sometimes even higher. It makes it very difficult. And so I think that the direct secretary market for

what I call traditional secondary firms has gotten really difficult because of the level of buying activity that's happened because of these platforms. Is that only in the late stage opportunities or do you see that cycling down lower in the market? That's really only in the late stage opportunities. You're a secondary market buyer today that's looking to generate institutional quality returns. You have to find diamonds in the rough companies that are like very good companies but people don't quite understand why. This goes back to your concentration question. All of the competitiveness is really focused in such a small

number of companies, but there's still a lot of value out there to be found in the smaller companies. And you still go get you discussed. Let's remember what our secondary funds, the whole model was pre-primilar going gets done. We invest a year later at a 40% discount, which gives you a massively better cost basis and entry point for a company. That's why secondaries work, for a very long time. And it can still work in the $200 million company that is growing 30%. That's a good business, but it's not hot. There you can still go find opportunities.

And anybody who's running secondary funds focusing on those opportunities. The secondary market, whether venture capital or private equity or other asset classes, has benefited from this information asymmetry. Some people have information about the assets. some people do not. Is information alpha still readily available in the venture capital market? Absolutely is. We now have a multi-billion dollar asset class where the buyers and oftenly the sellers

have no idea about how the company is actually doing. It is an information scarce market. Now, the people that have information have just a massive advantage in this market. It's not illegal to have insider trading, right? Like one party in a transaction can have all the information and being selling to another company that doesn't. And getting information ends up becoming the most important part of a secondary process. You have to be able to make sure that you have information parity if you're going to make an investment. In some companies you can do it.

And when we can't find it, then we just pass. Everyone I talked to on the show is chasing the same thing, an edge. And more and more, the edge comes down to your information, not just having. it but being able to trust it when the stakes are highest. AI is doing more of the information gathering for you every day, and most tools are very good at sounding right. The summary reads clean, but can you trace it back to the filing, the transcript, the specific passage that drove the answer, or are you just trusting the confidence of the output?

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There's a famous decadillionaire that I was accused of insider trading in the public markets. And I always said his model was actually pretty brilliant, which he would pay all the different investment banks, full fees on huge trades. So you basically would be paying for information. And I always said if only he had done that within the private markets, you would have a lot more money probably and not have dealt with issues I had to deal with. There's one side that I think again the smaller companies,

the ones that only have a couple people following them, I think that's probably true. But because the demand on the buy side, yet the big companies, there are no discounts out there in those companies. Nobody's selling at a discount, right? So even if he has information, he's still got a bid against all the other buyers out there

that are happy, excited to transact at whatever price the market will bear to get access to those companies. So I'm not sure it would create the level of alpha that you think. So let's talk about power law, a public vehicle to access venture capital. How did you come up with that idea? I was thinking after six funds, what did I want to do for Fund 7?

my first two funds returned themselves really fast. And I looked around and said, the world is choking, choking on 10-year liquid funds. I want to go out again, even though I'm in the hottest part of the market, secondaries, right? Like, this is a good time. A lot of people perceive this is a great time from secondaries. I'm not sure I agree.

But I looked around and said, does the world need another 10-year liquid fund? And I'll say, I've always been product and differentiation focused. Like, how can we differentiate ourselves against the competition? When I came across closed-end funds as a vehicle to hold late stage private assets, I realized that this wrapper, this new kind of wrapper, gave LPs exactly what they wanted, which was exposure to late grade names,

but in a wrapper where I asked them for one year of illiquidity so I can get the fund deployed, gone through the SEC, and then trade it. And then from there, it's choose your own adventure for the LP. They get to decide when they exit. They get to decide when this portfolio is, when their views topped out or whatever, or they don't like the way of room management.

And then they can exit whenever they want. That is like crack for LPs, for a group of LPs that are very frustrated of venture, that are sick of just putting their money into massive blind pools and do growth stage. And that's really what inspired us to go down the incredible rabbit hole of taking a VC fund public. And that was where the exception of the idea came from. What did you learn going down this rabbit hole? It's really hard. There's a reason why many people don't do it.

the opportunity for closed-end fund is created by something called the 1940 Act. The 1940 Act is the same law that created index funds, ETFs, mutual funds, interval funds, and then closed-end funds are like this little 30-stepchild that people don't use so much. But yet an industry that has experienced in venture and with laws within the 1940s, and trying to take a venture fund and fit it within all the rules and regulations. It means that my life now has no longer really spent it looking at deals. I spend my life translating venture capital assets to lawyers and accountants and fund administrators because they all have to be 40-act specialists.

I spend my life translating how these venture assets are supposed to fit in the framework created by a law in 1940. There's tremendous uncertainty. The lawyers don't really understand it. And that is the hardest part trying to make that all work. And that is something that I went into it with eyes only partially open. I sort of saw this and said, we can deal with this. But it's proven to be an extremely difficult process to get all the vendors and all the key stakeholders aligned in how to apply those rules to venture capital assets.

you went in knowing that it was going to be difficult. You just didn't know the order of magnitude, how difficult it was going to be. I'll give you some real examples of this just to make it just to drive at home. I really thought naively that we were going to be able to pull off this closed-end fund just with our existing team, right? And by the way, the fees on closed-end fund,

it takes you like 18 months of incredible hard work just to get to charge your first set of fees. I had to hire a full-time, very fancy CFO, I had to hire chief compliance officer, I had to hire two law firms, I had to hire second general counsel to deal with the regulatory side of the business is full-time. And none of that were things that I thought I needed before I went down this path. So that gives you a sense of how difficult it is and sort of the investment that you have to make if you're going to try to try to. to create a publicly traded closed-end fund. Who are the early investors in the public vehicle? And has that surprised you?

I would say that the early investors pretty sophisticated, like most of the capital came from large wealth platforms. And so we're talking about very high-endarm worth individuals investing through a wealth one of the wealth management platforms. We also have many family offices, many of the traditional investors that would normally make an allocation to a VC fund, who looked at this and said, this is a way better model, right? And so the early investors, I would say that it's all about what expectations were.

Like, people are really happy and really impressed with the underlying performance of the fund. The market has been terrible for the last two months since we got out. And so the sophisticated investors who are like, look at this portfolio and say, this is an amazing set of companies, in my opinion, they're fine because they're just, just planning to hold this portfolio for a long time. I think the folks that we're hoping to get some massive premium when it goes public and say they're less happy. But we also have 600 investors. So we hear from a lot of different types of people and you can't make everyone happy. I would say that the ones that I care about are happy. It's a recurring pattern that hundreds of GPs have

told me is that with any product, unless I guess you have a 20x VC fund that has 5x DPI in year two, you're going to have some LPs invariably that are going to be unhappy and some LPs that are happy. You can't maximize to making every single person happy. You never can. And there's just a thousand points in time where people can second guess you. And if that bothers you, you're in the wrong business. Like, just don't be in it. If you want to be loved, don't be in this business. We've been loved by everybody, right? So the people that

understand the asset class totally get it. But I've always had a rule that no matter how small the LP, I will talk to anyone who wants to talk to me at all times. And so you could always get on my calendar if you're an LP in Power Law or

Acadian. And I get to talk to them a lot. And it's so interesting because most of their opinions are based on very shallow perspective on what's happening. And I revel in those conversations because I give them the bigger picture. And once they get a bigger picture,

then they're like, oh, okay. And by the way, I differentiated myself from LCC funds surely by the fact that I take all their phone calls. And so they're very appreciative when I will just take the time to explain to them why I did things or what's going on. Now, as a public company,

I'm much more limited in what I can say. So when I have these calls, this is like the underside, we're a public company, I can't provide the material non-public information. You can't help that information vacuum. And an information vacuum,

people put in to that space almost always what's the most negative interpretation of what's going on. But to the extent I can, once I educate them in the bigger picture, then the objections kind of go away. talking to the beginning of the conversation about these SPVs, it's almost become a dirty word in some parts of the market. And I think for the first time historically you have executives from top companies like Anderol and Anthropic disavowing these SVVs.

Have you had any issues with getting on cap tables due to the misinterpretation of Giaclus? I feel like I'm back in the early days of secondaries. Like when I started doing a secondary in 2010, nobody knew what a secondary was. I spent my time going around to CFOs and CEOs and explained to them like, this can be a market. Like this can be a way for your employees to get liquidity. You're in year eight. Like show your employees some love. And at that time, I'll tell you this, half the industry loved it and thought what I was doing was really cool.

and half the industry hated it. We are at the nascent point in this whole process of bringing closed-down funds to market. And so, like, what you said is really important. Like, people, it's just a new thing. So we've spent the last year really figure out how to navigate that, how to sell the companies and say, look,

and do you want to be in a list of the top 20 private companies, along with many of your best peers, or I can go to your competitor, I don't say that, but the implications that I want you in my fund. And I'm going to spend the next three years before you go public educating the retail markets about how great your company is. And just like in the early days of secondaries where I had to get in and explain to them how you had this phrase.

I was like, secondaries are the way that you show your employees, you love them. It's a marketing event for you. And now I'm saying, look, you can go take more money from some big institution. It's not going to change your life at all. But we're going to be out there talking at screaming at the top of our lungs about how we're the next three years. And so there's a pitch here, right?

The number of companies that are really resistant, it's pretty small. It's a lot less than the number of companies who said we would never do secondaries back of the day. Like I would say half the companies that I went to at the early days of Acadian were like, get out of here. I'm not interested. This just creates too many problems and the VCs hated it.

This is actually easier selling a lot of ways. So over time, as this gets more normalized, have you already see like really great companies like Stripe, for example, that is just totally fine with this. And we've already split into the tiny number of companies that really resist it and fine. It's a big world.

You go out and find a company that doesn't resist it. And that is something that would, the maturation of this asset class, I think it all becomes normalized. And it's going to be like, why aren't you out there providing retail access to your company? By the way, providing, like, the people out there are angry that they can't get access to these companies. It's a policy problem for the industry that the greatest companies are held out from access to the public markets during their period of growth. I get this from people all the time. It's fundamentally unfair.

So just for the politics and the PR value, giving retail investors access, showing them that you recognize that they deserve a seat at the table too is a really good thing to do for your company. Now, the small group, they're resistant. That's fine.

We move on. Speaking of early days in I think the mid- 2010's when the Fidelity's in Wellington look into the market, there was this concern about Fidelity now marks your startup valuation every quarter and now that messes up with internal valuations, with primary raises, with 49A valuations, etc. Are there tradeoffs there in terms of yes, maybe these companies get access to retail, but now they have to share information, they have to share valuations and all these things?

Well, first of all, they don't have to share anything. Two points of this. Number one, there are already so many marks out there that are public already. And guess what's happened? Nothing. This is the perfect example of a philosophical or made-up fear that has turned out to be not a problem. And now you can go on to different sites and see exactly where every public mutual fund is marking the company. So the fact that you have one more fund, that's a public fund marking the company too.

And by the way, all the marks seem really close to each other. So it's really just a non-issue. That doesn't come up. And the information sharing? Information sharing. So information is like anything else. Like there are companies that are very positive information, companies that aren't. No, but now it's important to say as a closed-end public fund,

the biggest downside to the vehicle is that we're extremely restricted in what we can say about the portfolio companies. The only things that I can say about the public companies are things that are already in the public sphere. When data breaks raises around, we go to a pitch book, that's just public development. The company doesn't have to do anything. That information is already out there. But what we're not doing is getting proprietary inside information about the financial forms of the company. and then repeating it. We can point to their public statements on the revenue,

and we can provide that. But we are not allowed as a regulatory matter to expose any additional financial information that we get as a part of our investment process with the public. It all has to come from third parties. As we've discussed, these are some of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley, like Stripe that you mentioned.

how are you able to access these companies? For 16 years, we have a team that has been very successful in using the secondary markets and now primaries as well to get access. So I didn't start this yesterday. When we came up with the idea of a closed-end fund and we came up with the idea, look, we're going to go after a list of companies. We're going to market that to LPs and then we're going to go get a percentage of them. Like, we are a acquisition machine, and there are just so many ways we can create exposure.

We can participate in primary round. We can do individual secondaries. We can buy SPVs, which we've done. But what a little unlocks is, like, there's a lot of pen of demand for liquidity with that inside SPVs. And so we can buy those just to help the interest. We can do that. I have having such a deep set of experience with a team that's been acquiring positions, in companies is what really differentiates us from the other people that are doing this,

because that's what we're really the best at. You give us a company, there's a way we're going to be able to create exposure. Not all the time, but it's going to be a lot better than somebody just starting this anew. They have to figure all that stuff out. We got 16 years of knowing how to do that. So that's kind of, I think, our core competitive advantage. And the evergreen structure, this is something you set up one time, or is there, plan to create another vehicle. Right now we're focused on making power loss successful.

And that is what I think about 24 hours a day. But what people don't understand by every instructions, a couple of things. Like, once you're public, you can raise more capital in the public markets through a number of different mechanisms. You can put debt, non-delude of debt, on the portfolio. You can do what's called an ATM and at the market offering which means you can sell shares into the market if you're trading in a premium to raise additional money that way. You can even do private placements and like raise the money privately and then have it to put it into the fund. And so there's a lot of opportunity to grow your asset base once you're public. When I started looking at this and then comparing it to a 10 year liquid fund where you have

a set of what, $500 million a committee capital and then you have to invest in. that over five years, and then it's your fees decline, and you can't raise more money for it. I saw that as just like an extraordinary advantage in terms of how to build these portfolios over time. We can start with a relatively small fund and build liquidity base in the market after we're public. But at the same time, what I don't have to do, and this is the best part. In year three, when I've deployed my capital, I don't have to. to go raise a new fund. These funds are evergreen.

It's permanent capital. And so that we can just sit there and grow the capital base over time without having to go start again with a new fund. Has for future funds, I'm sure they're going to come. The timing of those is up in the air at this point. But we've created infrastructure. One of the things we did was most firms, when they do this, they hire a bunch of consultants to provide a lot of the extra services

that are needed, we built everything in house. We are full-time people to do all those jobs. Something that I believe for many years, and now it's becoming almost this meme in Silicon Valley, is building these internal modes. Famously, SpaceX became vertically integrated. Now almost every defense company is becoming vertically integrated, meaning it builds a lot of these competencies inside,

these hard things that compound with time that maybe don't allow you to go from zero to one as quickly, but just massively compound and continue to build enterprise value. Even though we're VCs, we're entrepreneurs too, right? We spend a lot of time thinking about moat. Part of the moat is just we're the first VC fund that's done this. We're the first VC fund that is going out and trying to bring best practices about underwriting portfolio construction to the public markets.

But a huge amount of the moat is just how difficult, it is to create one of these vehicles. Now, you can do it. People do it. But I will tell you this, I have gotten a lot of VCs that have called me up. It reminds me the early days of secondaries. We were like, Ben, how do I do a secondary, right?

And I had a lot of lunch with VCs. And once I get into the infrastructure that they have to create, and you have to learn a very complicated, detail-oriented structure where rules are crazy and it don't make sense. And you have to build a team that can manage all of that.

That itself is a moat. The ultimate mode is going to be just great performance in building a brand. That's something we're in the early days of. And because being able to make this repeatable, who will require that? But we're going to have competition. Any financial product,

modes I would say, compared to SpaceX, are relatively, then. Everything that we do is that are in public documents, right? Like you can go read all the decisions we made. You may not know why we made those decisions, but you can go read how we did it, right? Like you get the basic structure. So every financial product can be copied. They will be copied and that's okay. So when we think about long-term defensibility so that we can get an outsized share of the market compared to our size, that's why we built the expertise in house. so that it's repeatable, that we know every part of it, that we have control over every part of it.

And it was expensive to do that. So in doing this from scratch, it does require. And like I said, you have a tremendous amount of upfront costs and you don't get your fees until you're actually trading in the public markets. And that takes a long time. So you have to pretty significant investment to make one of these happen. How much did you invest before you saw your first dollar? This gets a question. So we raised $408 million and deployed the vast majority of that.

But we started this project. My first meeting where Mike and I, Mike Dinsdell is my partner, CFO of DocuSign, Doordash and Gusto. And when I showed him closed-end funds and sort of pitched him, hey, look, this is a really interesting thing to do. He absolutely loved it. Then we had an offsite. And for context, my traditional sales. secondary business was a value business. We would buy a hundred million dollar software companies growing 30% at four or five times revenue. And all my investors want to talk about discounts.

And I was a deep value guy. My reputation was like one of the most disciplined guys on price around. And I went to my team who I've all trained, right, in my investment philosophy. And I said, no, no, no, for the next fund, who are going to go by? the highest price, high growth companies that we've been passing on for years, we think the numbers are crazy, they looked at me like, and one of them said, Ben, you're violating every rule about investing that you ever taught us. And I just simply said, well, part of being an investor is you got to have a flexible mind. And my point was, we got a better rapper here for going after those assets.

Everyone else is still doing it the traditional way. and if we have a different wrapper, I have a better way to exit. That is a way to create value for our investors. And when I made it clear that this is what we are doing, and I got a lot of pushback, then they all came around eventually. But when I allowed to raise the first power line,

we only went out to raise 200, but my traditional LPs were just like, Ben, you were a value guy. We didn't invest in you to go buy, stripe at full price. Like that's not why we were with you. And I lost a lot of those LPs and going to

create the fund. But the idea had so much traction that I was easily able to replace them and in fact double the amount of money we planned to raise. So at that point the team had come along and said,

yeah, this is clearly an idea of meeting a need. Last time we chatted, you were on this crusade to create dozens, if not, I think you mentioned 100 other closed end funds. Is this just shodden fruit? Do you want to see other people suffer? Why do you want more competitors? Clearly

we've shown that there's investor demand for the closed end fund wrapper, right? And also these businesses, compared to 10-year liquid funds, have some real fundamental advantages. What do I discuss?

One is, our fees are based on net asset value. So as net asset goes up, our fees go up, right? We can't get carried interest, so that's a downside, but you can get a little pieces of the fund at the beginning. But the fact that fees can grow and that key point is these vehicles last forever, they're fundamentally better businesses than 10-year funds if you're willing to suffer the payment of regulatory nightmares and the problems of being public and having everybody in the public sort of react and comment on you and managing a stock price every day was something I didn't have to do. I think that the business

opportunity is so compelling that lots of other people will end up doing it. Right. And the key is right now we are in the early stages of the Wild West of all this. It's secondaries in 2011. The secondaries before Facebook said it was all okay. Every time the SEC sees one of these things, they're getting more intelligent about what the regulatory structures are. Once the regulatory structures are clearer, it's going to be a lot less painful. Because we all just want to know what the rules are. So my point is, as this gets normalized, and as more companies see, hey, it's perfectly fine to have a closed-end fund that's already traded that has my position in it, it's going to get

easier and easier to do these things. The easier it gets, the more people will want to do it. I could come up with 100 ideas for funds that should exist, has probably traded closed-end funds. And so if I can come up with those ideas, somebody else is going to come up with them and do that. That's why I think it's going to grow. You're now in your second innovation in the venture space.

You mentioned secondaries in the early 2000s. Direct secondary specifically was very innovative. Today it's closed-end funds. As these markets evolve, is there almost a game theory in that? you want a certain amount of competitors out in the market with you? 100%. I think this is the same with any industry.

When you are all alone as a startup, it's really hard to create the market all by yourself, right? But if I have competitors out there with me and I can get into the opportunity set, I'm confident I will find our investors that fit our philosophy. And our philosophy is one of active management of these portfolios using, traditional VC portfolio construction and management policies,

and I bring 16 years' experience in doing that. And so I would say that is really sort of at the core of what we're trying to do. We talked earlier about this technological mode that you're building by doing everything in-house. What other competitive advantages are you trying to build as an early mover in this market? The most important competitive advantage we can have is just good performance, right? The second place where I'm trying to spend my time and thinking about is the closed-in fund structure has a lot of places where as a manager, your interests diverge from the LPs, from your shareholders. I keep on using that word, but we have shareholders now, not LPs.

and I'm going out there in the world as a, whatever is good for the shareholder is what's good for us over the long term. Even when those difficult decisions that come up where you're kind of conflicted, building a reputation as being a manager that thinks every day about what's the best for the shareholders and how to make them the most money possible.

Ben, it's been an absolute masterclass. Thanks again for jumping on the podcast for a second time. and looking forward to chatting again soon. All right. Thank you.