SecondMarket CEO Barry Silbert wants to completely disrupt the financial industry.
Wall Street should be wary of this financial startup that is trying to bring the financial industry upside-down.
New York City-based SecondMarket’s 14,000 participants manage over $1 trillion in investable assets and include global financial institutions, hedge funds, private equity firms, corporations (Facebook, LinkedIn, Zynga…) and high net worth individuals.
At the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford today, SecondMarket CEO and Founder Barry Silbert unveiled his company’s plan to launch a marketplace to buy and sell IPO Lock-Up Shares.
“When a company goes public you have 6 months of a lock up [when you can’t sell your shares],” Silbert said. Adding that banks hated his idea because they control those shareholders for 6 months and “they extract every last penny out of these transactions.”
Silbert also told the audience of entrepreneurs and investors how he finds new market ideas.
“If they [the banks] puke all over the table, we know that is the market that we want to get into because they’re making so much money off of the spread and the opacity that we know we can completely disintermediate that market.”
It’s getting personal!
Jean-Baptiste Su is the technology columnist for L’Expansion, the leading business publication in France. He’s also the co-founder and editor of TechPulse 360, a blog at the crossroads of business and technology, exploring the innovation and companies defining the high-tech and clean-tech industries.
Jean-Baptiste started his journalistic career 18 years ago at IDG in France, first as reporter at InfoPC (PC World) and then senior editor at Le Monde Informatique (ComputerWorld). He later joined Decision Informatique, part of Groupe Tests (01 Informatique, 01net.com…) as senior editor, before heading to France’s financial daily newspaper La Tribune as its local Silicon Valley correspondent.
