Keep pulling the thread on Dave Thornton.
Vested developed a private company selection model using differentiated data to identify the top 20% of venture-backed startups.
Vested has experienced a 100% delivery rate on share transfers from employees after more than 60 liquidity events.
Based on benchmarking and backtesting, Vested believes its selection model can reliably identify the top 20% of venture-backed companies.
Dave Thornton estimates that approximately 70% of employee stock options are abandoned, representing a market of $200 to $300 billion over a market cycle.
One of Vested's most important pieces of intellectual property is a machine learning-based private company pricing model.
The dominant use case for capital requested by Vested's users was from employees needing funds to exercise vested stock options within the typical 90-day post-termination window.
Vested is launching a tool called the "Vestimate" which estimates the fair market value of a private company's common stock.
Vested is a venture secondaries platform that provides liquidity to startup employees for stock options that often go abandoned or ignored.
A subsequent version of Skilling Games' illiquid asset pricing model has been rebuilt inside a major bank and is currently used for algorithmic trading on a $400 million book.
The existing market for stock option financing, including banks like JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley, was focused on senior employees from late-stage companies like Stripe needing large amounts of capital, such as $12 million.
Vested identified its target market as the long tail of rank-and-file startup employees needing smaller amounts of capital, such as $50,000, who were ignored by larger financial institutions.
Vested's selection model interprets key employee flow events as signals, such as a first CFO hire, a first non-founding sales team, or a quiet 50% layoff.