Modern Capital: The Private Markets Podcast

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 firstUSB plug fests: what standards-building in Silicon Valley in the 90s teaches about private markets todayWhy the cap table is the birth certificate and how connecting it to the LP portfolio changes everythingThe August 2025 executive order on alternatives and why it accelerates the infrastructure problem before it solves itWhat 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.

Every time you allocate money into your 401(k), DTCC processes it. Every equity trade in the United States - over 99% of them - clears and settles through DTCC. Last year alone, it processed $4 quadrillion in activity. A million billions. Invisibly, at a cost of cents per transaction.Private markets have no equivalent. Yet.Private shares settle at T+90. Public markets just moved to T+1. Subscription documents still get stamped manually. Retail allocations to alternatives sit at 3% (institutions are at 20%), and if that gap closes even halfway, it adds $10 trillion in new capital that today's infrastructure cannot handle.That's the problem Talia Klein woke up to on day one as Head of Wealth and Investment Solutions at DTCC.She's built financial infrastructure at every major inflection point of the last fifteen years. Collateral eligibility systems at J.P. Morgan after the financial crisis - earning a patent in the process. Institutional blockchain at Digital Asset Holdings before most people knew what it was. Crypto custody at BNY, built from scratch, in five years. She has a habit of showing up early to the infrastructure problems that later turn out to matter most.In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Talia and Marc cover:The 1960s paperwork crisis that shut the NYSE on Wednesday afternoons - and why the digital version is already forming in private marketsWhy DTCC's FundServe playbook is the exact template private markets needs - and why it won't be a straight copy.The three-sided market problem: why private shares can't just be mapped to public equitiesT+90 vs. T+1: who closes that gap, and howWhy the standards problem isn't technical - it's about convening 100 institutions and making it worth their whileWhere DTCC is placing its bets across private funds, private shares and private credit"There's gotta be a better way." That phrase built DTCC in 1986. Talia thinks private markets is about to say it out loud - and that the organization that solved it for public markets is the right one to solve it again.The infrastructure moment for private markets isn't coming. It's here.

Apoorv Saxena built AI at Google under Fei-Fei Li, at JPMorgan under Jamie Dimon, and led AI implementation across the portfolio at Silver Lake. Each one taught him something different about where the technology actually breaks.Now he's building Obin AI - which just came out of stealth backed by Motive Partners with Fei-Fei Li as advisor - to deliver AI agents that operate at 99% accuracy inside financial institutions, fully auditable, replacing core workflows end-to-end.In this podcast, we talk about why most firms spreading AI across 50 use cases are destroying value, what Dimon's three-hour first-principles interrogation revealed, and why the winners in financial AI won't be the fastest movers... They'll be the ones who build the right foundations first.

In the early 1990s, Ed Brandman was at JP Morgan helping build FIX, the protocol that automated order flow between Wall Street's biggest buy-side and sell-side firms. It took years, regulatory pressure and a handful of 800-pound gorilla institutions to force the change. But it happened. And it reshaped public markets forever.He thinks private markets are heading to the same inflection point."You think about all the information that LPs want to get their hands on related to portfolio reporting every quarter end... that today, still for the most part, comes via PDFs."In 2026. PDFs.That's the problem Ed came out of retirement to solve. After 11 years as CIO at KKR - where he grew the tech team from 5 people to 140 - he founded ToltIQ, an AI-native due diligence platform built specifically for the complexity of private markets deal workflows.In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Ed and Marc cover:Why due diligence hasn't changed since the days of boxes of documents - and why AI can finally fix itThe FIX protocol parallel: what private markets needs to do to scale to $30T+How ToltIQ is applying AI to VDRs, credit agreements and expert network callsWhy waiting 6-9 months on AI adoption is already a competitive disadvantageThe new ToltIQ + DealEngine partnership, and what it signals about where the market is going"There's really not upside to delaying it. And if anything, you put yourself at a competitive disadvantage."Ed is one of the most thoughtful voices in private markets technology - and one of the most generous with his thinking. This one is worth your time.

Tens of millions of trades are coming to private markets in the near term. In this episode, Andrew Tarver lays out math that should get everyone interested in scaling private markets very focused indeed:Tarver is one of private markets' most important builders. He's co-founded a unicorn, dozen other companies, ran Capco UK as CEO at 35, and now helps lead private markets strategy across Motive Partners' portfolio - including InvestCloud, which runs $4 trillion in managed accounts.Here's the problem:The industry is staring down a whole new version of the Paperwork Crisis with even a 7-8% model portfolio shift (it'll likely be higher). That's hundreds of billions in new allocations. And it's not just the initial orders. After a big public markets move, model portfolios automatically rebalance. Markets drop 15%, you're suddenly over-allocated to privates, and the system triggers a wave of redemptions to get back in line. Every quarter, every drift correction, every strat change generates more orders. At $10K-$20K ticket sizes, that's tens of millions of orders. Per year.Today's infrastructure handles about 1,000 orders per operational FTE annually. The industry's current NIGO (failed trade) rate sits at 8%.Do the math:At current staffing ratios, scaling this requires 48,000 new operational staffAt $200K–$300K per head, someone needs to find $10 billion to pay themAnd that's just one platform — before RIAs, 401(k)s, or fintechs like Robinhood and Revolut enterTarver's analogy is perfect: private markets today are where payments were 15 years ago: paper slips, manual processing, three copies of everything. The industry needs to go from imprinter to tap-to-pay.His answer: digital standards, rules-based infrastructure, and accountability at every node... the same playbook he ran at Goldman, UBS, and Merrill's for two decades."We are no longer in the Wild West."This is the most important infrastructure conversation in private markets right now.Congratulations to Tarver and the entire Motive team - including Rob Heyvaert - for leading this charge. Huge episode. Listen to the full thing!

Alex Robinson, founder and CEO of Juniper Square, who built infrastructure used by thousands of private markets managers. He recounts a FedEx moment that launched the company. He maps where private markets infrastructure is headed, from AI and retail-driven change to next-gen fund administration. He outlines signs of maturity like factorized products, ETFs for private assets, manager FICO scores, and near-zero trading costs.

Join John Markell, a growth credit specialist from Armentum Partners, and Matt Schwartz, Head of U.S. Finance at DLA Piper, as they explore the revolution in private credit. They discuss the rise of growth credit for cash-flow negative businesses and how the collapse of SVB reshaped lender practices. Discover why enterprise software lending is oversaturated and where opportunities lie. Markell shares essential advice for founders on leveraging debt effectively, while Schwartz highlights the risks and nuances in today’s lending landscape.

Introducing: Modern Capital, The Private Markets Podcast. Conversations with the leaders building the infrastructure of modern private markets. 

Rob Heyvaert, founder and managing partner of Motive Partners, is a serial entrepreneur who has reshaped private markets infrastructure. He shares insights on why private markets are approaching a transformative 'Bezos moment,' emphasizing the need for interoperable systems to enhance customer experience. Rob discusses the infrastructure hygiene blocking innovation and advocates for individual ownership of data. He predicts a future with super apps and stresses that the success of private markets depends on adapting to massive transaction volumes.