Henry Ward knows private markets.
He built Carta, the cap table company that’s now an ERP for venture, private equity and private credit funds. He’s also thought about how these markets work as deeply as pretty much anyone I’ve spoken to.
His starting point: everything in private runs the opposite way to public.
In public markets, it’s easier to sell one share than a billion dollars of stock. In private, it’s easier to sell a hundred million dollars of a company than a single share.
In public, the last trade sets the price. In private, the first buyer does.
“We generally believe price discovery and liquidity is a feature of markets. And venture capital, specifically private assets, it is not a feature. Price discovery and liquidity is a bug. And that’s what people miss about this problem.”
But the private shares dialogue is much less interesting to me than what’s next for Carta:
Henry wants to build the system a fund runs on: the accounting, the reporting, the legal work, with AI doing most of it. He says 90% of Carta’s journal entries are now booked by agents, up from zero in January.
His bet is that if running a fund gets cheap enough, there will be a lot more funds.
A few more things we cover:
The human calculators NASA once relied on, and what they say about AI in fund admin
Why a company can be a software company or a data company, never both
How AI could let every LPA be a “snowflake”
Why the next generation of fund CFOs wants finance to help generate alpha
2040: two firms left, or a million of them
Private markets can grow without ever trading like public ones. Henry is betting that growth runs through the funds.
Henry’s episode also goes deep on AI in private capital, a big focus of Cleared for Deployment, our AI governance summit in New York on December 9.
Listen to the full conversation here, on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
AI is already doing real work inside private funds. We’ll dig into how to govern it at Cleared for Deployment in New York on December 9.
Attendance is curated and limited to 100 senior executives.
