# When IPOs Are No Longer the Default Exit: Slickorps Ventures Asks Why Secondaries Have Become the New Infrastructure of VC


A quieter but more consequential shift is under way. Venture-capital "exits" are no longer completed naturally through an open IPO window; they increasingly resemble a liquidity project that must be actively managed. TechCrunch, citing observations from large LPs, notes that more funds are being forced to hold assets for 15 years or longer, pushing cash-return timelines materially backward. For Slickorps Ventures, this is not a mood cycle but a hard constraint of capital structure. As fund lives lengthen and DPI is delayed, secondary markets cease to be a stopgap and begin to perform a more fundamental function: "turning time into cash". At the same time, Carta estimates that VC secondary transaction volume over the past 12 months reached roughly USD 61.1 billion, exceeding the USD 58.8 billion raised by VC-backed IPOs over the same period. The change in scale suggests that secondary liquidity is moving from the margins to the main channel. The conclusion of Slickorps is stark: the centre of gravity for exits is shifting from the exchange bell to liquidity conduits within private markets.

## Secondaries Are Not One Trade, but Three "Valves": Who Uses Them, and for What

As secondary markets move up the hierarchy, they offer not a single product but three distinct liquidity mechanisms. LP-led fund-stake sales address portfolio rebalancing and near-term cash needs. GP-led continuation funds and restructurings keep legacy assets alive and reprice them when exit windows fail to appear. Direct secondaries, including tender offers, release liquidity at the company-share level, allowing employees and early shareholders to avoid tying their wealth entirely to an uncertain listing timetable. A Jefferies report shows that global secondary-market volume reached about USD 103 billion in the first half of 2025, with LP-led transactions accounting for roughly USD 56 billion and clearing at an average of about 90% of NAV. The signal is unambiguous: LPs now treat secondaries as a system for "manufacturing liquidity". Slickorps Ventures therefore draws a broader conclusion. Secondary markets are not the bench for IPOs; they are a new "gatekeeping system" within private capital, determining whether funds can recycle capital on schedule and continue to finance the next phase of growth.

## What the Discount Is Really Pricing: Not Cheapness, but a Bill for Tradability

Once IPOs cease to be the default exit, the core pricing question in secondary markets becomes straightforward but uncomfortable: how much is "the liquidity" of this private asset worth. Slickorps Quant prefers an explicit decomposition of the discount.


Time discounts reflect the opportunity cost created by lengthened exit cycles. Information discounts arise because buyers lack the same depth and symmetry of information as lead investors. Structural discounts stem from terms, transfer restrictions, and rights hierarchies that constrain real "sellability". The data of Carta offer a market thermometer. In the first half of 2025, the 75th percentile of tender-offer discounts returned to around 15%, indicating that more deals are clearing through "lighter discounts for execution". The discount itself has become the necessary cost of releasing liquidity. In the view of Slickorps Ventures, this marks the emergence of a private-market "price-discovery system", not through public quotes but through discounts and completed trades that write tradability directly into valuation.

## The Endgame of Slickorps: Treating Secondaries as a Liquidity Channel Between "Emerging Markets and Global Capital"

For Slickorps Ventures, the significance of secondary markets extends beyond the United States and Europe. They represent a replicable layer of capital infrastructure. Where disclosure density, equity structures, legal enforcement, and cross-border portability reach sufficient maturity, companies and assets are more easily "absorbed by secondary markets", drawing long-duration capital in on a sustained basis. The best-practice guidance of ILPA for GP-led restructurings and continuation funds stresses transparent processes and alignment of interests, while regulatory shifts are elevating the value of "credible process" itself. As external rules become less uniformly prescriptive, trust increasingly rests on industry discipline and standardisation.

Slickorps Quant therefore models "secondary absorption capacity" at the regional level, using disclosure quality, structural clarity, regulatory portability, and liquidity-mechanism maturity as measures of tradability. The conclusion follows naturally. Future VC competition will not hinge solely on investing in good companies, but on keeping assets tradable, priceable, and recoverable across longer life cycles. That, ultimately, is the capital-channel advantage Slickorps is building for the long term.