Secondary Market Liquidity & Revolutionizing Private Company Stock Ownership & Investment with Forge CEO Kelly Rodriques

Today, we have a special guest who is changing the mechanics of private company stock ownership and investing for the better for employees, companies, and investors alike.

Kelly Rodriques is the CEO of Forge, the leading private company stock exchange and investment platform.

On today’s podcast, Kelly and I discuss:

• How private markets are the new public markets.
• How companies like Forge are unlocking a huge wealth management opportunity hidden in plain sight.
• How Forge is creating new accredited investors directly on their platform thanks to secondary market liquidity - and what that means for the alts space.
• How the private markets can innovate with structured products like index funds that provide diversified exposure to blue-chip private company stocks. 
• How and why strategics like Deutsche Borse and BNP Paribas see Forge as critical to the private markets ecosystem.

Kelly has helped build out the private market investment ecosystem at scale for Forge, bringing together a trading business, a private markets exchange with data, and managed liquidity solutions for late-stage private companies. Kelly and Forge also acquired and operate IRA Services, a self-directed IRA custodian with over $13 billion in assets across 1.5 million accounts.

Forge has transacted on over $10 billion in deal volume and counts many of the top private companies as customers. They’ve also received meaningful investment from strategic investors like Deutsche Borse, BNP Paribas, TD Ameritrade, and Munich Re.

Kelly has a great background to be building Forge. He combines a background as a successful serial entrepreneur with multiple exits, the deep marketing acumen, and the expertise from leading one of the largest self-directed IRA businesses, Pensco, to a successful sale. Prior to joining Forge as CEO, Kelly was the CEO of Pensco, one of the nation’s leading alternative asset custodians, which had over $16 billion of assets under custody and was sold to Opus Bank for $104 million in 2017. 

Kelly was also a founding investor of mFoundry, the leading provider of mobile banking services, which was acquired by FIS in 2013. He also built Totality, which he sold to Verizon in 2006, and has run an early-stage FinTech VC fund, Operative Capital, that has made 26 early-stage FinTech investments.

Thank you Kelly for providing such an insightful and fascinating look into the transformation happening in the private company stock market space. Your passion for innovating in private markets is palpable and such a welcome addition to the industry.

I hope you enjoy.