Amit Gairola & Griff Norville: Customer Obsession Comes to Private Markets

Private markets grew for decades without obsessing over the investor experience. A few hundred GP names mattered, and they competed on one number: returns. There was no pressure to care about reporting quality, data timeliness, or what it felt like to be on the receiving end of a quarterly PDF.That era is over.Amit Gairola spent a decade at Amazon, where every decision came back to one question: what does this do for the customer? He brought that question to private markets and built Daphne, a permissioned data layer that makes straight-through data processing possible between GPs and the allocators, platforms and fund of funds that invest with them.Griff Norville is Co-Head of Innovation at Hamilton Lane, one of the largest allocators in private markets with roughly $1 trillion in assets under management and supervision - and both a backer and live user of Daphne. He's watched the industry evolve from one where delivering returns was enough, to one where a new class of investors brings expectations formed by public markets, consumer technology and the Amazon-era assumption that a good experience is simply the baseline.The problem they're solving is not subtle."The uncomfortable truth in this industry — for all the growth we've had and the improvements that we've made — is that we still operate with PDFs and emails and cumbersome data rooms."In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Amit, Griff, and Marc cover:Why private markets built its infrastructure around documents instead of data and why that logic no longer holdsThe difference between data extraction and straight-through processing, and what closing that gap actually requiresWhy standardization keeps failing - and why AI-powered translation may make it irrelevantHow evergreen funds moving from quarterly to daily valuations are making the current system untenableWhat 401(k) access and secondary market growth require from data infrastructure before either can scalePrivate markets has to start treating its investors like customers. Delivering a great LP experience is becoming the new standard, and the infrastructure to make it possible is only now being built.