Amar Varma: From Tinder to the Plumbing of Private Markets

Not many people can say they sold a product to Barry Diller that changed how an entire generation meets.

Amar Varma can.

In the early 2010s, his mobile incubator Hatch Labs ran ten ideas through a corporate skunkworks inside IAC. Nine went nowhere. The tenth became Tinder.

You know the rest.

Now he's five exits deep and building Mantle, working on a problem that's less culturally famous but more consequential for anyone managing private markets capital at scale.

Public markets work because everything reconciles. CUSIP codes. DTCC clearing. Buyers and sellers matched every day. Bloomberg exists because that foundation does.

Private markets have cap tables updated by hand at 9pm on closing night. LPs logging into fifteen portals with fifteen 2FA codes. Subscription agreements tucked in a drawer. No identifier that follows a security from issuance to LP portfolio. No reconciliation layer. 

The market is $30 trillion and growing. A 2025 executive order just opened $12 trillion in retirement assets to alternatives. 

The infrastructure problem doesn't get smaller from here.

In this episode, Amar and Marc cover:

• The Bloomberg-DTCC parallel: why public markets work and what private markets needs to build first
• USB plug fests: what standards-building in Silicon Valley in the 90s teaches about private markets today
• Why the cap table is the birth certificate and how connecting it to the LP portfolio changes everything
• The August 2025 executive order on alternatives and why it accelerates the infrastructure problem before it solves it
• What five exits actually teaches you about getting lucky

"Nobody gets tired when they're doing the thing. They get tired when they're not successful."

The infrastructure moment for private markets is here. Varma has spent thirty years showing up before anyone else knew there was a problem.

This one is worth your time.