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 holds
• The difference between data extraction and straight-through processing, and what closing that gap actually requires
• Why standardization keeps failing - and why AI-powered translation may make it irrelevant
• How evergreen funds moving from quarterly to daily valuations are making the current system untenable
• What 401(k) access and secondary market growth require from data infrastructure before either can scale

Private 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.