Milan Reinartz: Founder to Platform Builder, Community-Led Angel Investing & Scaling Private Access – E565

"Now, what's interesting is that this asset class of investing in companies in late-stage unicorns in the US—like SpaceX, Perplexity, OpenAI, Anduril—these are probably names that a lot of people have heard before. But generally, you can only really buy them on platforms like Forge or EquityZen, which are US secondary trading platforms. Here, you'll encounter a wide variety in price per share, oftentimes trading above the primary price, meaning the price at which the company has raised money. It's also very difficult to access at ten- to twenty-thousand-dollar check sizes, and the companies themselves may not necessarily like that—they don’t want their information flooded in the market. If you're a larger family office, you can go to Macquarie Bank or other banks or brokers in the US and buy a larger block of shares. But even then, let’s say you're worth ten or twenty million dollars—would you really put half a million into SpaceX? If that’s five percent of your net worth, it's still probably too high a chunk for a single asset class." - Milan Reinartz, CEO at NonPublic

"And we figured that here in Southeast Asia, you actually have almost an oversaturation of funds, not enough exit liquidity downstream, and therefore it's quite a difficult game to play. There hopefully will be some winners and some fund managers who will show significant returns and DPI—distributions per capital—back to their LPs, to their investors. But at this point, this isn't really a proven-out thesis, right? And so, from a fund manager's point of view, at some point you have to go after larger family offices—ideally institutional capital, sovereign funds, et cetera. And that didn’t seem to us as an easy thing to do. And so we were thinking, okay, what does the market need, and what are the problems in the market in terms of early-stage investing? And that led us on a path of really focusing more on a platform business, where we figured, hey, what if we could build technology that provides more transparency and more liquidity to investors within this whole realm of early stage?" - Milan Reinartz, CEO at NonPublic

"The intellectual side of investing is actually super interesting because, when I was working in advertising technology, basically I would wake up every morning and think about how can I show more ads to people—how can I make sure that people buy more burgers or shampoo or whatever the advertiser wants to sell, which, obviously, there's a big market there. But you're basically looking at one problem all the time. And the interesting thing about investing is you really shift your focus a lot between different verticals, because industries change so quickly and technology changes so quickly. So now, I'm probably deeper on some other verticals than ad tech because of investing. My brain is constantly stimulated by looking at all these different verticals. I really enjoyed it, and I wanted to spend my time full time on the subject matter of investing." - Milan Reinartz, CEO at NonPublic

Jeremy Au reconnects with Milan Reinartz to explore how angel investing evolved into a community-led platform, why Southeast Asia’s VC math doesn’t work, and how late-stage private markets offer new opportunities for retail millionaires. They talk through founder quality, opaque incentives, and the need for real diligence in a fragmented region. It’s a grounded take on what needs to change in early-stage investing and what’s already shifting.

1. From solo investing to a platform: Milan started out deploying his own capital but realized he needed to pool investors to access better rounds.

2. Backing experienced founders only: He avoided pre-revenue startups and focused on tier-one operators with track records and strong fund backing.

3. Bundling small checks to access big rounds: The club combined smaller investments into a single vehicle to meet the $100K+ minimums of top-tier deals.

4. Vetting with the right experts: The community cross-checks deals with vertical operators like SaaS leaders or commodities experts to assess traction and founder integrity.

5. Southeast Asia’s exit math problem: Milan explains how capital raised outpaces available exit value, making traditional VC returns nearly impossible at scale.

6. Filtering out bad faith actors: Milan and Jeremy discuss how investors can use networks and peer validation to spot red flags early.

7. Giving accredited investors better access: Milan’s platform opens up late-stage private tech companies like SpaceX and OpenAI to “retail millionaires” without large ticket sizes.

(01:05) Jeremy Au: Hey Milan, excited to have you back after so many years and so much has changed since then. Yes. Good to be back. Yeah, since then, I think we've come off the pandemic, zero interest rates era has ended, you know, you're not working remotely. So, lots of different changes that happened and excited.

(01:21) Why don't you introduce yourself? 

(01:22) Milan: Yeah. Hey, my name is Milan. I've, been one of the early interviews on your podcast. When you started, some years back, and we also work together. I'm a tech entrepreneur, so I've built a couple of advertising technology companies, had one recent exit to a German company

(01:37) called Show Heroes, where I'm still an advisor to, and have since started another business. We started an Angel Club, which I think I, we already covered a little bit in the previous podcast and that sort of evolved to now, turn into a platform for private market investing, very high level. I'm also the father of four beautiful children.

(01:56) I just made a move to live in Indonesia and Lombok on a (02:00) tropical island. And yeah, working remotely. Yes, the zero interest rates thing that has been tough for me as well for the fixed income side. I don't know if we want to go into this. 

(02:09) Jeremy Au: Definitely lots to go into actually.

(02:12) So I guess the big one has been, I think the big move into building non public, which came out with Sand Angels, there's also Orville, but I think the big one is like, why did you make that shift? 

(02:22) Milan: Yeah. So, so at Sand Angels, we started as an Angel Club, really from my point of view to invest my own money. So, I started with a few hundred thousand dollars of my own money, where at some point I made a decision to say, I want to

(02:33) deploy 30 to 50 times 10, 000 checks. And I realized quite quickly that it's not so easy to deploy $10, 000 checks into the kind of companies I wanted to deploy. So, I wanted to deploy really mostly into companies that are founded either by repeat founders who've built and sold companies before,

(02:51) or companies that are built by, by people who have deep experience. And also I didn't really want to do the traditional Angel investing (03:00) model, which is in very, very early stage companies that are pre- revenue. 

(03:03) That was not what I wanted to go after. I really wanted to do co-investments with leading funds so that I felt that there was some sort of risk mitigation. So really more focused at seed to Series A seed pre- A type rounds. And also what I would call tier one founders— so founders with some pedigree who've built companies before or were senior leadership in companies.

(03:23) And I mean, you were also there in the early days. So, I think you've, you've seen a lot of my journey. And what I found is when I did my first couple of deals, it's actually quite tricky to get into the best rounds because these are usually oversubscribed or at least they have a great lead VC, they have a solid term sheet, and they don't need, you know, 10, 20k Angel checks unless perhaps it's for strategic reasons, but I'm not going to be strategic to everyone, right?

(03:47) I may be strategic to folks who, who, in marketing tech, advertising tech, and maybe strategic to people who are looking for a European bridge because I have a large German network. But, but I may also be interested in a, in a (04:00) biotech company and I have no experience there. So, so that sort of led us to then building a model where, where really in the beginning, we, we just pulled together more people to join a, our community

(04:11) that are themselves founders and have deep experience in one category or another, but of course all accredited investors, meaning that they have to have at least a million dollars in net assets, excluding their primary residence under Singapore law, or $300, 000 in earnings over the last 12 months.

(04:26) And so, we kind of got a great group together of people who understand certain verticals very well. And that gave us the ability, and so it started with 10, 15 people, and then it was 20, 30, 50, 100, and eventually a few hundred people. And that gave us the ability to firstly assess deals in a much more efficient way because if it's a, let's say, let's say, you know, a person X sends me a enterprise SaaS deal that's, you know, a company servicing the commodities industries.

(04:57) So I, I'm not super deep on (05:00) SaaS to some extent and I understand almost nothing about commodities. Now I look at my network in our club and there will be several SaaS founders. There might even be a C-suite from a SaaS unicorn in there, and I have several people who are in commodities, right?

(05:12) Maybe family offices who have traditional businesses in commodities trading. And so now we can run this by multiple people and therefore learn very quickly if this has a real market, and we can also now use this network to check about the founders integrity, basically get references, unsolicited references on the founders.

(05:28) And so, that helped us a lot. And I think that's what really kind of kicked off ascend as a, as a model. And apologies, really to answer the initial challenge I've had, which was, you know, I have some stories. I think Fabrice was here at your house before, X Lazada, where I tell people, 'Hey, okay, here's my 10K', you know, and I say, 'sorry, Milan, minimum 100K.'

(05:46) And I say, what if it's 20K? Like, no man, 100k, you know, that's what my VC is saying. And so then, now, now we have the ability to also bundle basically a bunch of interested parties together in a vehicle where then they have their 100k minimum track size and they (06:00) get multiple Angels and the Angels who are lesser experienced in that field and might like the founder, the space, the traction, can also gain insights from the other Angels who understand the space much deeper and we're sort of all helping each other.

(06:12) So it's really a community-driven model, a network-driven model that that's, I would say very much a virtuous cycle. We started this really as a hobby. I was still running IVS, which we then excited to show heroes— Cheng-Wei and me really, really very much as a hobby.

(06:27) There was no intention in the early days to build this into a really, really big business or anything. It was just meant to be a hobby, and of course we need to cover the costs, etc., of setting up these vehicles so there's some charges on basically corporate secretarial. But it wasn't really meant to be a big business.

(06:42) And as I went through the exit and then also managed to kind of, you know, I went, got through my earn out relatively quickly and managed to be able to really full time focus on investing, and that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to spend my time more on investing. I found myself really enjoying the work, and enjoying the intellectual side of this, (07:00) the intellectual side of investing is actually super interesting because

(07:02) you know, when I was working in advertising technology, we were, basically, I would wake up every morning and think about how can I show more ads to people, you know, how can I make sure that people buy more, you know, burgers or shampoo or whatever the advertiser wants to sell, which, you know, obviously there's a big market there.

(07:17) But you're basically looking at one problem all the time. And the interesting thing about investing is you really shift your focus a lot between different verticals. Because, also, industries change so quickly, and technology changes so quickly. So now I'm probably deeper on some other verticals than ad tech because of investing.

(07:33) My brain is constantly stimulated by looking at all these different things. I really enjoyed it and I wanted to spend my time full time on this subject matter of investing. But I've also noticed that, you know, to really build a sustainable business, a meaningful sized business that can, you know, employ

(07:49) at least, you know, 10, 20 people and be profitable, and do good work. It's not easy as an internet investor to be successful and it's not easy to be successful as a VC fund. (08:00) You really have to put some resources behind it. So to build a sizable enough business, we then we're thinking about what's next, right?

(08:06) And the initial thoughts were, well, okay, what are the options? What do Angel Clubs usually evolve into if they don't just stay Angel Clubs? They can evolve into an accelerator or an incubator type model. They can evolve into being a fund manager, that's probably the most common.

(08:19) There's some great examples with Ice Angels, shout out to Robbie. I think they've done a tremendous job in New Zealand and really, turning an Angel Club, Ice Angels, into now Icehouse Ventures, which has become a powerhouse of funds basically in New Zealand. And we figured that here in Southeast Asia, you actually have almost an oversaturation of funds,

(08:39) not enough exit liquidity downstream, and therefore, It's quite a difficult game to play. That there hopefully, will be some winners and some fund managers who will show significant returns and DPI , distributions per capital back to their LPs to their investors.

(08:53) But at this point, this isn't really a proven out thesis, right? And so from a fund manager's point of view, at some point, you have to (09:00) go after larger family offices, ideally institutional capital, sovereign funds, etc. And that didn't seem to us as an easy thing to do.

(09:08) And so we were thinking, okay, what does the market need? And what are the problems in the market in terms of early stage investing? And that led us on a path on really focusing more on a platform business where we figured, 'Hey, what if we could build technology that provides more transparency and more liquidity to investors within this whole realm of early stage investing?'

(09:28) Jeremy Au: So I think lots of different things that you touched upon, you know, you said that you feel like there's an oversaturation of funds in Southeast Asia and there's not much exit liquidity. So, let's unpack that a little bit. What do you think is going on in Southeast Asia?

(09:40) Milan: I mean, it's a good question. The high level dynamics we observe, I observe and discuss with a lot of other fund managers and friends, Angel investors, and APs as well, family offices that I'm in touch with and speak to regularly— there are a few factors, one is there's a large amount of capital there.

(09:55) So, I'll give some examples and I'm not sure this is totally accurate, so don't quote me on it. I've read (10:00) numbers somewhere between five to 10 billion in circulation for being invested into early-to-early growth stage venture institutional capital,

(10:10) family offices, etc. in a, let's say four or five-year period. Now, what does a VC or an institutional investor who leads around of a Series AB, let's say AB VC, a Series AB Venture Capital round down in a company at exit. 

(10:23) Jeremy Au: I 

(10:24) Milan: think the data says it's like six, 7%, but let's say it's 10%, right?

(10:29) Just for argument's sake to make the math easier. So that means you would need roughly 50 to 100 billion in exit liquidity in a five-year period, 10 years from now. If we assume a 10-year close end fund life just to return capital to investors. Now, to have a decent VC like return, it should be really 3x, 4x.

(10:50) So, now we're talking about, you know, quarter to half a trillion dollars of exit liquidity needing to be available for everybody to be successful, for, for all institutional venture capital in (11:00) ABVC to be successful. And I think that is just absolutely not going to happen, unfortunately. And it's not just, it's not just that we're going to miss it by a bit, we're missing it by miles, you know, there's no, there's no tens of billions in exit liquidity.

(11:15) There's probably not even 5 billion in exit liquidity per year, right? If you think about it and you compare it to the available capital that I'm probably not aware of all of it, right? I mean, there's probably nobody's really aware of all of it. There's lots of pockets in corporate venture capital.

(11:27) There's pockets in obviously traditional venture capital and private equity. That all play in the space, and surely some will be successful and drive great returns. But the macro environment just doesn't allow for everybody to be successful. At least that's what the data shows now.

(11:42) I think it's a factor of many things, right? So, I think it has to do with one, the public markets not being as mature in Southeast Asia. So, I think Thailand and Malaysia have sort of, at least from what I hear, a bit more, you know, buoyant kind of liquidity markets from also from retail.

(11:57) You don't really have that yet iDX. I mean, most (12:00) of the stuff trading on IDX is not tech, right? It's traditional industries. So, that's one big factor, I think, is that exit liquidity is not really there. You do see exits, but most exits are between sort of 50 to a few hundred million dollars.

(12:11) So the unicorn exits is really very rare and really very, very rare. So then, the kind of power law system of VC investing is really difficult in Southeast Asia. It works in the US, right? Because in the US you have unicorns being born probably every day, every other day In terms of just volume of what's happening there.

(12:29) And I think Europe, Japan, China, India, they're markets that have much, much bigger capital markets in general that are a little bit more systemized and standardized already, which I think we don't have yet here in Southeast Asia. And that makes, I think that makes the VC market quite tricky. And that's not to say that it won't change.

(12:47) There's a lot of good things in Southeast Asia in terms of overall market dynamics that speak for the market. And I hope that folks will continue to invest here. And from everything I see, it does happen. It's just much harder to make money. And I think the way to (13:00) make money is probably different than what people expected 10 years ago.

(13:04) So rather than sort of the, the traditional power law investing of venture capital, where, you know, you have a portfolio of 20, 30 companies and you expect two of them to return your portfolio, plus 2x, doesn't seem to work very well, yeah. There might be some exceptions, but the majority, in the majority of cases that doesn't seem to hold true.

(13:20) The difficulty is that the market dynamics are very different because I mean, there's a lot of stuff that, you know, maybe it's repetitive to talk about really, but you know, you have Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, they're all very large markets, but they speak different languages, they have different religions, they have different, different cultures, different behaviors.

(13:37) So, it's also not so easy for a company to say, 'Hey, you know, Gojek obviously is in Indonesia. It's also in Singapore somewhat, it's in Vietnam somewhat. But there's no, it's not easy to build a tech platform for all markets that's hyper successful, right? I mean, Lazada maybe is a good example of something that sort of seems to work, and Shopee. But it's not easy to really capture that whole market.

(13:55) And I think that makes it difficult to play in that way. But on the other hand, I (14:00) think mid market private equity has done actually very well in many places. I think certain categories have also done better than others, especially those that have international markets. So I think biotech, there are some great examples, but a lot of them fly very much under the radar.

(14:13) So what we hear about is, you know, like e fisheries, scandals, and those kinds of things. But I think that the, at least for me, the people I respect and observe, they've been sort of changing their approach on not just following hype cycles, even though of course AI, I think is a space one needs to pay attention to now, but also thinking, okay, well, what I really need to think about is what is my entry point and what is my exit point?

(14:36) Right. And the exit point may just be that it's lower valuations, right? The other thing is it could be secondaries, right? So there's more funds now popping up that are actively driving secondary strategies within their portfolios and also normalizing that with founders as they invest, right? To say that, hey, we may want to sell secondaries when in year Series B or C.

(14:52) Jeremy Au: Yeah, amazing. And I think one part that you mentioned is that, you know, mid market private equity is something that you're seeing emerging. (15:00) And I think you definitely see a lot of people talking about it. What do you think are the drivers of a successful mid market PE approach from your perspective?

(15:07) Milan: I have to say, I'm actually not that familiar with PE— traditional PE. And PE business generally is platform business, right? So they may buy a company that is servicing a certain market, usually or mostly it has some physical element to it so it's a little bit less sort of hyperscaler tech, type dynamics.

(15:26) And they look at companies where they can go in, buy other companies, plug ons, and essentially drive a lot of bottom line improvements and make it very profitable and grow the thing and usually look at much, much lower multiples. So it's much more realistic. It's not no castles in the sky of, you know, I'll give you a 50x revenue multiple while you're burning cash and have a negative margin.

(15:47) PE doesn't do that, right? PE will, I mean the traditional set of PE, VC is really a subclass of private equity, right? But the sort of more traditional private equity players, I think they look at businesses more as an, 'okay, if we buy this business, we will go, (16:00) we'll take a board seat minimally.

(16:01) We will take a more traditional approach to running this business.' Right? And so that also means that the entry point that they will buy into, is from a valuation point of view, much lower. I think, that's a tough thing, also for startups because startup founders, especially as we talked about earlier, tier one startup founders, who might already have some money from a16z or Sequoia, they would have a sense that, this can be a unicorn,

(16:23) this can be a huge business. So, I think that mindset is important. There's some distance in that mindset, you know, because a PE, we'll buy a company on, I mean, depending on the growth rate, usually on a EBITDA multiple, right? Maybe that's somewhere between 7 to 15x depending on what it is. Maybe they will buy it on a gross marginal revenue multiple.

(16:43) And maybe that can be up to 10x if the company's growing tremendously well and they can see the consistency in the sales and they have reached a certain stage. But it's definitely not what you see in the US in terms of looking at companies at like 50x, 50x, 80x revenue multiples, or companies that have below 50% gross (17:00) margin. 

(17:00) That dichotomy is, I think, not so well understood yet by the market and probably not talked about enough. Here, you're kind of better off trying to play in the VC space. At least it feels like you're better off playing the VC space because you think, 'Hey, my company's worth 20 million, even though I'm only making half a million revenue and I'm burning tons of money,'

(17:18) Milan: versus, 'Look, I'm going to build a more sustainable business. I'm going to bootstrap.' There's these two divergent paths that are developing and the builder community, people who are building companies aren't quite sort of looped in the end with that, and I think that makes it tricky.

(17:30) Jeremy Au: I mean, of course, if you're a founder it feels nicer to talk to a VC who's giving you VC multiples which is an auto magnitude higher than somebody who's more focused on a private equity of a lower multiple. What's interesting is that you're also building non-public, which is building up access to kind of like private companies with access.

(17:46) Can you share more about what are some of the challenges and opportunities you see with this platform? Yeah. 

(17:51) Milan: Yeah. I mean, there's a few different elements to it. So, so we initially really were very focused on, on Angel-like (18:00) investments or VC-like investments. And we continue to through our community, source and also invest in, in quite a few interesting early stage opportunities.

(18:09) Although over time we've, in the early days, it was really very much, you know, Singapore, Indonesia is the majority of the supply of the companies that we see. A little bit of Vietnam, a little bit of Thailand, maybe, the occasional European company. Now, even that is shifting more towards, okay, if we see, hey, this is a category that people are interested in, that seems to get a lot of attention.

(18:29) And then we might find like, okay, this company here in Indonesia is interesting, but you know, these are some of the, here are some of the challenges, also information that we receive from the network. And then we may find a company in Europe that's solving a similar problem. And we might actually prefer that company because, because maybe they have a better backing, better investors behind, more and more investors behind them, or maybe they have just better unit economics, better multiple.

(18:50) So, on the Angel side, we find that we're starting to globalize more. We just got licensed in Australia, which is, which is really great. So that allows us to essentially open the marketplace, open the marketplace up (19:00) to sophisticated investors, without needing to be part of a club

(19:03) allowing the Angel investments to also happen through other syndicate leaders. Through Australian platforms, other syndicates can create their own deals. Our Angel Club doesn't have to be the lead anymore. The platform is opening things up to

(19:15) be more of a marketplace rather than just an Angel Club, which is also not as scalable. One problem that the platform solves, is to allow a broader set of startup type investments to be brought to investors and to a broader set of audience who can look at these deals.

(19:31) And at the same time, we try to keep the quality of the startups. You have an investment committee in our business. So we look at things like, gross margin multiples. We generally don't like gross margin multiples much above 10x. Of course there's exceptional cases, but generally in all ventures together, it just seems to be a more realistic entry point if you have sufficient traction on unit economics that you understand, 'okay, this is the margin this business can drive,

(19:55) how fast are they growing and what multiple are you willing to pay?' So, these are some of the factors that we continue to flow (20:00) in, we also only want to work with. syndicates who have a similar mindset, right? We don't want too much craziness on there, right? Because it's the early days and I think building credibility and building trust with the investors that what we deliver on the platform, what the investor base sees is sensible.

(20:15) You don't want every random dog food, DTC company that has some minimal traction raising 10 million dollars and nothing against dog food companies. 

(20:24) So, I think this is a basis of sort of the early stage stuff. Probably more importantly, what we found is that there's a tremendous appetite from, I would call them "retail millionaires." They're not retail investors because they're millionaires, so what I would call also maybe "mass affluence" or in technical terms accredited investors in Australia, it's defined as sophisticated investors or wholesale investors who fulfill certain criteria that qualifies them to invest in such opportunities.

(20:49) There's a huge amount of them, obviously, and I think both Singapore and Australia have a very high millionaire density, and these aren't all startup people, right? A lot of them are dentists, lawyers, accountants, (21:00) maybe SME, owners— they may not be interested in investing in a Series A startup or even Series B startup, but they would be interested to invest in large private companies from the US from Europe.

(21:10) So, our increased focus now will really be on this type of asset class. And there's a lot of interesting things happening there. So I'm talking about SpaceX, OpenAI, Perplexity. These are names everybody knows, but they're not available on the NASDAQ. 

(21:22) Jeremy Au: Right. And what's interesting is that, these opportunities go from A to B to C, and obviously this class of folks are probably upper middle class.

(21:32) Do you also see that flow of capital not only going to US companies, but also going into like local, regional private companies as well? At the growth stage? 

(21:40) Milan: I think to some extent, but I think the majority will still go to the US. And this dynamic is generally interesting and also it's quite a large market opportunity really.

(21:52) In general, I don't know if you saw, but Goldman Sachs latest model portfolio report, the only thing that changed is (22:00) they took a little bit from private equity and private credit increased versus public markets and bonds decreased slightly.

(22:07) That's the only change. And of course this is a, this is a model portfolio for private banking clients. So, so people who have a certain amount of net worth. Now, what's interesting, is that, you know, this asset class of investing in companies in late stage unicorns in the US, like companies like SpaceX, Perplexity, OpenAI, Anduril.

(22:22) These are probably names that a lot of people have heard before. But generally, you can only really buy them either you buy them on Forge or equities and these US secondaries trading platforms, but here you'll have a wide variety in price per share, oftentimes trading above the primary price, so what where the company has raised money at. And it's very difficult to access at sort of ten twenty thousand dollar check sizes. And the companies themselves may not necessarily like that.

(22:46) They don't want the information to be flooded in the market. And If you are a larger family office, you can go to McQueary Bank or other, other banks or brokers in the US and you can buy a larger, a larger block of it. But let's say you're worth 10 million, 20 million bucks, even (23:00) then would you buy half a million in SpaceX or million SpaceX, if, if that's 5% of your net worth, that still is a, is probably two higher chunks for a single asset class.

(23:08) So I think there's a really interesting opportunity there. Which is also driven by the fact that 10, 20 years ago, as the, the, you know, the FAANG companies, Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc., emerged and became very, very large businesses. This was available to everybody. This was available to retail, right?

(23:24) And the market pricing of these companies has been to some extent also defined by retail, right? I mean, that's what creates things like GameStop and meme stocks and these kinds of things. Whereas in now, I think we're entering an era where companies like SpaceX and OpenAI purposely staying private longer, right?

(23:41) And they're doing tender offers where they're essentially turning old, early employee stock and early investor stock into preference shares sometimes, and then sell those to the market rather than going to IPO, because there's enough demand from larger institutional players or larger family offices usually to raise more and more money into the company

(23:59) and also provide (24:00) liquidity for early investors without having to be public. This asset class isn't widely available yet, not even to accredited investors. So, I think that's really a space where we want to play and we want to make this more available at relatively fair prices. So, of course you would always, as a smaller ticket player, you will always pay a little bit more fees.

(24:19) You don't have to pay ridiculous price per share markups as you might get on secondary trading platforms with very small checks. And also you don't need to put a disproportionately high amount in a single company name. 

(24:31) Jeremy Au: Yeah, so 

(24:31) Milan: I think that's a really interesting space.

(24:33) Jeremy Au: Yeah, and you know when you think about the future for you know kind of secondaries and you know private markets, do you feel like private markets would get larger over time and how much larger do you think it would get versus public markets? I mean, it's a good question. I think 

(24:47) Milan: on one hand as mentioned earlier, you know Goldman Sachs has specifically put just, just what that made at one chance,

(24:54) I think it's 1. 5 to 2 percent from public markets and private markets as a relocation model. (25:00) And I think that has to do with this situation. It also depends a lot on the decisions of these large companies, right? Core weave is now planning to go public. And of course, there's some benefit in these companies going public, because going public, I mean, the NASDAQ or any credible stock exchange is still the best way to provide liquidity and also

(25:18) to have relatively efficient markets and pricing. I mean, it's also scary in a way to think that, two or three big VC players can basically decide OpenAI is now worth this amount of money or Masa Son can just decide this is how much it's worth. And then everybody else pays that price, which is not the case in public markets.

(25:37) So, I think there's a real benefit to these assets going public. And I, for myself, also as an investor, hope that more and more of them do go public because I think that's ultimately where you want to realize your liquidity as a private market investor and also just creates more transparent pricing and more realistic pricing and comparables. On the other hand, the incentives for companies like SpaceX and OpenAI to (26:00) stay private are also quite strong. Because once you're an asset listed, your compliance overhead, your regulatory overheads, your filing overheads become much, much larger.

(26:09) So, the question is, can you actually make as much progress and grow as fast once you are regulated? And I think once you're on a public exchange, and I think that's part of the reason why Sam Altman, Elon Musk, etc., are keeping these companies private longer. Because it allows them to react more nimbly. And as long as liquidity is not an issue and the valuations that these companies are raising at are supported by public markets, I think that market will grow.

(26:32) And this asset class, I don't think we are the only ones playing in this space either, right? So you can see many other companies starting to offer these, these types of assets, two, two sophisticated investors. And, and I think that it market for sure will grow. How much will, how much will then of these larger companies shift?

(26:47) Who public markets is, it's really hard to say at this point. 

(26:51) Jeremy Au: And the last question here is that, you know, you mentioned that you're now moving and working remotely as well, which is a six shift as well. Could you share a little bit more about how that happened and how that's turning (27:00) out? 

(27:00) Milan: Yeah, look, I mean, I was, for the last 10 years and a big thanks to Singapore and my mentors initially Reuben Lee and John Pang, who were my investors in Poster and my first company who initially brought me here.

(27:13) And then Peng from Monk's Hill Ventures, where you used to work. Recruited me to join IVS. I've had a really great time here in Singapore and I think it's obviously given my career. A boost that I think you couldn't have in most places in the world. Singapore is one of those hubs like San Francisco or London or Tokyo where, certain things can happen here and the kind of network you build is really tremendous.

(27:36) And I think Naval Ravikant talks about this a lot, like where you are really matters. But you are also, I have four children, so you're also kind of tied to a place. You live in a city. It's quite expensive to live. You want to do anything. You have to fly somewhere basically, and you want to have holidays, where you can, you know, drive to Malaysia or something.

(27:52) But I never really had the choice to say, 'okay, I'm just going to go and move to a tropical island. Because I think my board members would have been like, 'What? Are you moving (28:00) to Bali? Why?' Right? You kind of, it's not something I think that's so socially acceptable. Maybe also because there isn't enough data, if that actually benefits a company or not.

(28:09) I think in many cases it probably wouldn't benefit. I think ironically, I actually think there's still a benefit in being together as a team, especially in an early stage company, you just have so much more of this kind of coffee machine chat. You know, just being able to say like, 'Hey, can I quickly call you into a meeting?

(28:23) I want to ask you some questions.' I think that's really, really important. And most companies will massively benefit from having that. But for me personally, I found myself in a situation, you know, after the IBS exit to show heroes where we're realized, you know, with this business that we're running, we already have our people kind of all over the place.

(28:42) We have people in the Philippines and in Indonesia and Germany, in Australia and, you know, we have a few people here, but the majority actually not here in Singapore. And I don't have institutional investors, so I don't have anybody to tell me where to live. So, I just had this conversation with my wife and we looked at different places and the cost of living (29:00) and the quality of life.

(29:01) And that made us decide like, Hey, why not, you know, we, and so we, yeah, we just decided to build a big house, which I couldn't afford to do here in Singapore, and try it. And so far it's working really well. Awesome. Well, 

(29:12) Jeremy Au: thank you so much for sharing and to wrap things up. 

(29:15) I love what you talked about non-public and the progress so far as well as the public markets and private markets. On that note, let's wrap 

(29:21) Milan: things up. Thanks for having me. 

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