Conform to the Market You Want to Serve

The one-source industry

"The notion that they are going to somehow conform to us is just hubris. We are going to have to conform to them if we want to serve them, if we want to exist in their world," Apollo Global Management's CEO has said of why the firm is rebuilding public-market plumbing around private assets.¹ The alternatives industry existed for roughly forty years in industrial form, built entirely out of one capital source: the alternative bucket of institutions, transacting through quarterly-marked drawdown funds. Rowan's own description of the pattern: "yes there were private equity funds, but then there were real estate private equity funds and infrastructure private equity funds and credit kind of private equity funds. It was all one business." The asset class changed; the buyer, and the label on the fund, never did.¹

The new markets, and what they require

Five additional pools of capital, individuals, insurance companies, the debt and equity buckets of institutions rather than their alternatives bucket, traditional asset managers, and 401(k) plans, all "want nothing to do with a drawdown fund. They live in a public world." They run on daily net asset value systems, expect daily liquidity, and in several cases carry legal obligations to mark positions daily. A capital-call structure with a quarterly estimate is not merely a mismatch in preference for these buyers; it is an operational impossibility inside their existing infrastructure.

Conforming to them requires market structure, not marketing, on a stated timetable: daily estimated value across the investment-grade private suite by June 30 and across the whole credit business by the end of September, standardized identifiers comparable to a bond's CUSIP, standardized data warehouses, market-making dealers, and regular price disclosure.¹ The goal, in this framing, is to build an ecosystem where private assets carry the same transparency infrastructure public securities already have. The prize, in Rowan's own accounting: "I've never seen a market in the world where you have transparency and price discovery that is not 10 times its size."¹ The limit placed on the whole project is explicit: conform, "but we have to also do it in a way that does not bastardize our products, that does not create unacceptable mismatches between risk and reward." Daily pricing is not the same thing as daily liquidity, and the difference between the two is the entire safety margin.

A second route to the same destination

Vlad Tenev is pursuing the identical goal, continuous liquidity for assets that were not built for it, from the opposite direction: tokenization on public blockchains rather than institutional fixed-income market structure, aimed first at retail rather than institutions, and applied to pre-IPO equity rather than private investment-grade credit.² One route frames the exclusion as a portfolio-construction failure reaching institutions and retirees alike; the other frames it as a retail inequity. That two approaches converge on the same destination, continuously priced private assets sitting inside ordinary portfolios, reached from opposite ends of the market, is reasonable evidence the destination itself is real.

The general lesson

The transferable version of the rule has nothing to do with finance specifically: when you want a new customer, the burden of format adaptation is yours, and it is usually infrastructure work rather than packaging work. The same instinct shows up whenever the answer to the objection that users will not change how they already work turns out to be building toward the user's existing format rather than arguing them out of it.