What are VC Fund Secondaries?

Episode Summary

Max Kausman is the founder and solo GP of Advance VC, Australia's first dedicated fund-of-funds with a focus on secondaries.

Advance VC buys existing positions in Australian and New Zealand VC funds—acquiring stakes from investors seeking liquidity and giving new LPs diversified access to mature, validated portfolios across multiple vintages dating back to 2012.

In this conversation, they discuss why secondaries won't "save" all of venture (only the top performers), how discounts actually work (spoiler: the average is 30-35% but it's wildly bespoke) and why vintage diversification matters as much as portfolio diversification.

Time Stamps

02:47 – Max's first investment: lessons as a 14-year-old basketball coach

07:08 – Defining secondaries and Advance VC's unique LP fund focus

09:44 – Why vintage diversification matters as much as company diversification

13:57 – How secondary transactions actually work: the three-way deal between buyer, seller, and fund

19:24 – What Max learned looking under the hood of Australian VCs firms across different funds and vintages

24:09 – Why Max decided on a secondary Fund of Funds (FoF) model

34:16 - Pricing secondaries

42:20 – What discounts actually look like in practice

47:40 – Will secondaries save venture? The truth about liquidity and why it's concentrated in top performers

50:16 – Building Advance VC and the founder journey of becoming a fund manager

Resources

Max Kausman - https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxkausman

Advance VC - https://www.advancevc.com/

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:

Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp
Spotify Ad Analytics - https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/ad-analytics-privacy-policy/