How VC Secondary Markets Changed in 10 Years - Thomas Dadashi (Entier Capital)

Ten years ago, telling investors you were doing secondaries in venture-backed tech companies meant explaining what secondaries even were. Today, everyone wants to talk — because everyone has liquidity needs or is considering a transaction.

Thomas Dadashi, founder of eNTIER Capital, walks through the mechanics and market dynamics of secondary investing in late-stage European tech. The conversation covers how secondaries work in practice — buying stakes directly from founders, VCs, or LPs — and why pricing discipline matters more than chasing trophy names at inflated valuations. Dadashi explains the shift from a buyer's market where education was the challenge to today's competitive environment where differentiation comes from relationships, sector focus, and the ability to move without fund deployment pressure. The discussion touches on specific cases including Revolut, Darktrace, and Vinted, and explores why operating deal-by-deal rather than through a traditional fund structure offers flexibility to pause when markets overheat.

**Key Discussion Points:**

🎯 Secondary transactions require navigating preemption rights, board approvals, and cap table politics — securing waivers upfront avoids doing all the work only to be preempted by existing shareholders

💰 Discount-to-NAV is misleading in venture: different funds mark the same company at wildly different valuations, and paying a premium can make sense if the exit case justifies backward calculation

🚀 Target returns of 3x in four years reward liquidity risk and mispricing risk in late-stage companies, often just past profitability but two to five years from exit

🧬 Biotech and life sciences represent the next frontier — a market even more dislocated than tech secondaries were a decade ago, requiring clinical trial expertise and likely a dedicated fund structure

📉 AI hype creates dangerous FOMO: Anthropic's valuation jumped 20-25% every few weeks in early 2025, while fintech and SaaS assets sit at reasonable prices with less competition

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About Thomas Dadashi [Founder of Entier Capital]:Founder of Entier Capital, a European venture secondaries firm he launched in 2019 after three years as Investment Partner at TempoCap and earlier experience in PwC transaction services in Paris. Since founding, Entier has closed more than one hundred and fifty million dollars of transaction value, focusing on direct secondaries on operating companies and selective LP-stake transactions on early-stage VC funds, with past deals including exposure to names like Revolut, Darktrace, Vinted, and Seedcamp.About Aulium:Aulium is a video show exploring Innovation and Private Capital, hosted by Thomas Viguier.Connect with us:➡ Aulium on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aulium➡ Thomas Viguier: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tviguier/