The Secondary Market Mess and the Data Gold Rush

The blowup between USVC and Anduril wasn't just a Twitter spat—it exposed something deeper about how venture capital actually works in 2025. USVC claimed they'd bought exposure to Anduril at its Series H price; Anduril co-founder Matt Grimm said they hadn't. The real story, as Nikhil Basu Trivedi of Footwork and Michael Kim of Cendana Capital explain, is that secondary markets for private company shares are still the Wild West, and the tension between founders who want to stay private forever and investors who need liquidity is only getting worse.

The Secondary Market's Structural Problems

The Anduril-USVC blowup happened because of several converging forces. Venture capital is more power-law obsessed than ever, with LPs and GPs alike fixated on a "hit list" of maybe six to twenty companies—SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Anduril, Databricks, Stripe. Everyone wants exposure to these names, and that creates pressure to find creative ways in. One common tactic: fund managers create SPVs holding shares in a coveted company and use them to entice LPs into committing to their broader fund. The problem, as Michael Kim explains, is that "the issue with SPVs is the provenance of whether they actually have the shares." When you stack multiple layers of ownership, most investors don't verify each layer is legitimate.