Barry Silbert: Investment Banks and Secondary Markets

The investment banks I think are, they're kind of conflicted because you have three different pretty, four different kind of very important groups in the investment banks. You have wealth management, investment banking, equity trading and then kind of the principal side of things. And they all want different things here. The investment bankers want to take companies public, they want to sell them. Wealth managers want to get their clients out of the stock to help them manage the money. The principal guy is basically want to screw everybody else and control the information and buy and the equity capital markets. They'll trade anything. And so to date their involvement has been, let's use Goldman as an example and all the major banks, they're buyers on second markets and I'm talking about broadly speaking across all the asset classes. Their wealth management channel are very good sources of referral business for us. The trading guys, they're trying to figure out how to get involved here but haven't been able to figure it out. And I think over time if they see money, they're going to go after it. We would love to figure out a way to tap into the expertise and the distribution that exists at the major banks. But I got to tell you, when I first started this company and we were out there in the first year, I took meetings with every single major bank because I thought that they were going to be our key to success. I thought that they were going to be the, the most important buyers, sellers, partners. And after like a dozen meetings, it was like you want to blow your brains out. They just, they can't think outside their box and they just don't innovate. So I think again, it's going to take there to be a very big revenue opportunity. That's I think why you saw kind of a Goldman Facebook type deal. But beyond that, you know, we're not really seeing a lot of that activity yet, but we will if there's a big opportunity.