AGM Unscripted: Goldman Sachs' Harold Hope - Secondaries: A Primary Consideration

Think it's really about problem solving. I think every time there's been an innovation, it's been because there's been some problem and people don't know how to fix it. And if it involves illiquid assets, the secondary market has said, well, you know what? Actually, we can figure out a way to do this. We can figure out a new structure or a new security or some other way to kind of solve that problem for you. And so what I love about this industry, it is a solutions oriented industry. Welcome back to the Alco's mainstream podcast. In this special series, we went behind the scenes at the Goldman Sachs alternatives conference and interviewed six Goldman Sachs Alternatives leaders about their current thinking on private markets and how the firm has built and evolved its private markets capabilities. The next interview in this series is with Harold Hope. Harold is the global head of vintage strategies, one of the world's largest secondary fund managers in the external investment group at XIG within Goldman Sachs asset management. We had an interesting and insightful conversation. Thanks, Harold, and please enjoy. Harold, welcome to Out Goes Mainstream podcast. Thanks for having me. I think such a fascinating time to talk about the work that you're doing. Secondaries is top of mind for so many reasons. Maybe we should just say secondaries are in first right now. I like that. So first I wanna start with your background and how you got here because I think that'll be instructive to the conversation about where the secondaries market is today. Well, like a lot of people that have been in the industry for a while, I sort of fell into it. I was working at Goldman Sachs. I was in investment banking. This is twenty five, twenty six years ago. And I realized that I wanted to do something that was more investment oriented, more long term. And we had actually just raised our first secondaries fund, which was $400,000,000 The market back then was maybe like $2,000,000,000 a year in volume. And I happen to know a couple of folks that were in that group, and I convinced them to let me join them when I was kind of a junior professional. And that's what I've been doing for the last twenty five years. How has the market changed? And has it changed in ways that you've anticipated? It has changed so much. I look at the market today. It is so different certainly than it was twenty five years ago, but even just five or ten years ago. And I think the biggest drivers of change have been just the growth and the size and scale. A lot of that's been driven not so much by secondaries, but more by the growth in private markets and the wider range of investors in the asset class, the need for more liquidity. So that's been the biggest driver. And then the other big driver …