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we paid $3,500,000 for clarity .com Good buy or waste of money? @claritymovescap

When do private companies need to approve SPVs? As a major sponsor of venture SPVs, I thought I’d share some thoughts on this, particularly in light of all the chatter on this topic surrounding Anduril and Anthropic lately. First, some reasons why I have good information on this topic: 1. In just over 2 years, starting in April 2024, we built an SPV business with over $2.1 billion in AUM (at FMV). We have learned a LOT along the way. 2. We manage both single-layer and dual-layer SPVs. Most of our SPVs, by value and number, are single-layer, but a substantial portion are dual-layer. 3. Our single-layer funds are DIRECT shareholders on-cap table of over 40 late-stage unicorns, including the likes of @AnthropicAI, @perplexity_ai, @cursor_ai, @Kalshi, @Polymarket, @LiquidDeath, @cerebras, @Apptronik, and dozens of other household names. Now, do private companies need to approve SPVs? It depends on what you mean by that. Here are four different cases. 1. An SPV purchases a company’s stock. If the company has an approval right over transfers (they usually do), then YES, this purchase must be approved. 2. An SPV syndicates to investors instead of using pre-committed capital, in order to complete a direct primary investment. YES, an issuer has the ability, in the purchase agreement or subscription agreement, to require the investor to use pre-committed capital instead of syndicating to fund the investment. 3. An LP of a single-layer SPV sells to a new LP (the recent Anduril case). NO, this transaction almost never requires company approval, and neither the GP (@packyM) of the single-layer SPV nor the selling or buying LP (@ankurnagpal) typically seeks company approval (@mttgrmm). Company approval typically has no bearing on the validity of the investment. 4. A second-layer SPV invests into the primary issuance of a first-layer SPV. Unless the underlying primary investment documents prohibit syndication (we have rarely seen this), NO, this transaction does not require company approval. One big misconception seems to be that the company can or should approve transfers between investors in an SPV that holds direct stock, or that the GP or LP should get the company’s blessing for such transactions (case 3 above). This idea runs contrary to decades of private market practice. Hundreds of billions in LP stakes in private equity funds change hands every year. The underlying companies almost never approve such transfers, and in the rare cases they do, it’s usually because the GP is going to them out of deference, not because they are required to do so. It's only the explosion of SPVs in the venture space that has brought sudden attention to this question. Happy to debate this topic if anyone has a different take.

Glad to report that @AnthropicAI has corrected its blog post and removed Hiive’s name. The post was made without any notice to us and caused needless confusion in the investor community plus unfair damage to @Hiive_HQ's reputation. Let me be clear: every investment through Hiive is 100% legitimate, approved (when approval is required), and cannot be “invalidated”. If Anthropic came to us about their new policy in the first place, we would have worked with them on a unified message to the market. The real problem? The private market is filled with unlicensed insiders and VCs peddling access for massive fees (that are essentially brokerage commissions) without being licensed by FINRA. Yet, licensed FINRA member firms like Hiive—who actually bear the substantial compliance burdens—are treated with suspicion. We will not be slowed down by traditional gatekeepers. Our mission to build state-of-the-art liquidity infrastructure marches forward undaunted. When truth is on your side, you have nothing to fear.

Most founders treat liquidity as a distraction. The founders getting this right treat it like a hiring decision: deliberately, early, with a view of what they're building toward. Today at 11:05AM, I'm on Center Stage at @websummit Vancouver with @KyleHanslovan of @HuntressLabs. @susanliTV of Fox Business is moderating. If you're there, come find us after.

Public markets love a benchmark. That’s why the smartest private companies are using secondaries to shape their IPO before they file. These charts show the trading histories of @rubrikInc and @Chime on Hiive, their IPO prices, and their closing prices a few weeks post IPO. In both cases there was meaningful, controlled secondary trading ahead of the IPO. Not fire-sale liquidity. Not hype-fueled bidding wars. Just real price discovery: buyers and sellers aligning on value over time. Instead of the roller coaster ride many companies experience upon going public, it’s easy to see the market already had an understanding of the intrinsic value these companies had, possibly due to the secondary trading both companies allowed on @Hiive_HQ (and other platforms). That process does more than move shares around. It actually builds structure into the market: → A trading range emerges, anchoring expectations → Overhang gets absorbed, further reducing day-one downward trading pressure → Cap tables consolidate, improving post-IPO float quality and providing confidence to new institutional investors In other words: secondary trading becomes a quiet rehearsal for the main event, providing the market with information it never had before. This isn’t anecdotal anymore—it’s a repeatable pattern. And it’s rewriting how companies think about IPO prep. Liquidity is no longer just a late-stage employee benefit or investor pressure valve. It functions as a pre-listing signal, a market primer, and a cap table optimization strategy—especially for companies planning to list in the next 6–18 months. As the IPO window cautiously reopens, this may become a defining feature of the strongest offerings: companies that went public with a price, not just a guess. #liquidity

Why does #liquidity matter, you ask? We ran a blind survey of 500 tech employees to find out.

Almost $2 billion in #liquidity served...