West Coast MVP Vibes… and a New Team Player

Written By: Jared Carmel, Managing Partner at Manhattan Venture Partners

With later and larger IPOs becoming the new normal, the secondary market is gaining traction globally. Plus, having worked with buyers, sellers, issuers, and investing in numerous leading technology companies, it was high time for us to plant a regional office in the Bay Area.

Over the past few years, we have expanded headcount judiciously by design. In addition to our headquarters in New York and satellites in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Atlanta, MVP has a robust international footprint with offices in Mexico City, London, Dubai, Buenos Aires, and Istanbul. Ironically, we did not yet have a presence in the tech capital of the world. Why? We simply had not found the right partner… until now.

Andrea Lamari Walne is a natural fit.

Andrea has been institutionalizing private company liquidity in the secondary market since its early days, beginning her career as a co-founder of Forge (previously Equidate). Prior to joining MVP, she led the Liquidity Solutions team at Carta (previously eShares), and before that she spent three years leading the West Coast team for NASDAQ Private Market, where she ran business development for this unit, bolstering Nasdaq’s presence by supporting late-stage, pre-IPO companies before they listed on the exchange. She has facilitated transactions for companies such as Slack, Uber, Stitch Fix, DoorDash, and PagerDuty.

Brad, Eric and I have known Andrea for several years, and have gotten to know both her character and her business prowess. So when I learned she was interested in a transition into the venture space, we connected. She expressed it was important for her to partner with a team with a well-established brand and a solid reputation for respecting the issuer and their privilege to be a private company first and foremost.

Andrea’s success in facilitating more than $10 billion in secondary market transactions is unprecedented, and with all that she has experienced and built over the last five years with NPM and Carta, she is the right person to help grow our Secondary As A Service business line. We feel fortunate to have her on the team.