How We Work

The best technology companies today often stay private well into the billions in revenue. They have outgrown their early investors, yet their shareholders — employees, founders, and early-stage investors — need liquidity. We work with these companies directly, acquiring shares from existing shareholders in a way that aligns our interests with management’s.

We are not a venture fund deploying capital into early-stage rounds, nor a traditional secondary fund optimizing for discount. We are a long-term partner to companies at scale — the kind of shareholder management teams choose to have on their cap table.

We bring a team of senior operating executives — the Dockyard Fellows — with decades of leadership experience at Amazon, Google, Cisco, Intuit, and Symantec. They work directly with portfolio companies on technology strategy, enterprise relationships, and go-to-market execution.

We bring a public market perspective to private investing. Our research process is anchored in conversations with customers — experienced buyers of technology who can tell us whether a product is truly differentiated, whether its competitive position is defensible, and whether the management team is meeting their needs.

We think of customers as key investors in a company. When a customer bets their career on a technology product — when they view it as a platform on which to run their business, not merely a tool — we have found a potential investment.

Our criteria are narrow:

• Companies at scale — Scale revenues, growing at 40% or more year over year. These are companies that would have been public a decade ago.
• Customer evangelism — products that inspire executives to bet their careers on them. Net revenue retention above 120%, meaning existing customers spend more every year.
• Durable competitive moats — products deeply embedded in mission-critical workflows, integrated with customer systems, extraordinarily difficult to replace.
• Free cash flow potential — high gross margins, customer acquisition costs that pay back in under 24 months, and a business model that generates significant free cash flow at scale.
• Clear exit visibility — a path to liquidity through IPO, strategic acquisition, or the developing secondary market.

Semiconductors. Our highest-conviction infrastructure bet and a core area of expertise. The modern bottleneck in AI data centers is no longer raw compute — it is data movement and power consumption. The next generation of structural winners is emerging.

Enterprise applications. Extraordinarily difficult to install, integrate, and replace. Deals are hard to win — but once won, they are extraordinarily hard to lose. The best enterprise application companies maintain net revenue retention rates above 110%.

Fintech. Next-generation banking and financial infrastructure companies are reaching extraordinary scale while remaining private.

AI infrastructure. The biggest technology cycle since the internet. We invest where the competitive moat is durable and the technology is being designed into the next generation of architectures.

For forty years, public investors could buy the best technology companies early in their growth curves — Apple, Microsoft, Salesforce, Workday — all at roughly $200 million in revenue. That era is over. Companies like Stripe remain private at over $4 billion in revenue. SpaceX has never sold a single public share.

More than $5 trillion in enterprise value now sits across 2,000-plus private technology companies. The median time from founding to IPO has tripled over the past 25 years. But shareholders need liquidity — and the direct secondary market, now approximately $240 billion in annual volume, is the mechanism.

We acquire shares from early investors and employees at valuations we believe offer compelling risk-adjusted returns. Our target companies have financial profiles that can be analyzed with the same rigor as any publicly traded business. Every share traded on the public markets is itself a secondary share. What distinguishes our companies is simply that they happen to still be private.

Concentrated portfolio of approximately 8 to 12 positions. Five-year term — half the duration of a typical venture or growth equity fund. Intermittent liquidity as positions are realized through IPOs, acquisitions, or secondary sales. Capital returned to investors upon realization.

Our risk profile is closer to a public mid-cap growth fund than to a venture portfolio. We expect most positions to reach a liquidity event within three to four years.