Every time you search a private company on Yahoo Finance, the price you see comes from Forge.
That single fact captures something that has taken private markets decades to build toward: reliable price discovery.
Public markets have had it since the ticker tape. Private markets have been running on last funding round, guesswork and quarterly PDFs.
But the infrastructure gap runs deeper than pricing.
Retail allocations to private markets sit at 3%. Institutions are at 20%. An executive order last year opened $19 trillion in U.S. retirement savings to the asset class.
And none of the funds currently packaging private shares for public investors are actually connected to the underlying NAV of the companies inside them. Investors are buying structured products priced on sentiment, not on what the companies are actually worth.
That is the problem Kelly Rodriques has spent the last decade building the answer to.
As CEO of Forge Global, he assembled the three pieces private markets were missing simultaneously: price discovery anchored to real transaction data, custody infrastructure for uncertificated securities and a marketplace architected to integrate into major financial institutions at scale.
In July 2025, he demoed it to the ten largest firms in the country. Several came back wanting to buy the company. One sent Chuck Schwab himself to take the meeting.
"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."
The phrase "Schwab of private markets" had been in an internal Forge deck since 2020.
In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Kelly and Marc go deep on:
The NAV problem: none of the funds currently packaging private shares are connected to the underlying value of the companies inside them and why every allocator watching this space should pay attention
The 401K moment: an executive order opened $19 trillion in U.S. retirement savings to private markets, and the infrastructure question of who absorbs that capital and how
The civic argument: 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, and where Forge fits into that buildout
Kelly is one of the most precise thinkers on private markets infrastructure I've spoken with, and one of the most candid about how the buildout actually happens.
This one is worth your time.
Listen to the full conversation here, on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
The questions Kelly raises in this conversation are exactly what we’re convening around in New York on May 28 at The 2026 Private Wealth Infrastructure Summit.
We’re bringing together fund managers, platform builders and wealth leaders around an agenda that covers 401K infrastructure, evergreen fund operating models, post-trade processing at wealth scale and what private markets distribution looks like when it actually works.
