Access Matters More Than Analysis in Private Markets
Most investors believe effort drives outcomes. Work harder, learn more, analyze deeper, and the results will follow. In public markets, this is roughly true. Information is available to anyone willing to find it, and the investor who does the work can build an edge.
Private markets break this assumption. Not because effort doesn't matter, but because effort only has leverage once you're already in the room. The deals that move outcomes most are frequently allocated before they're widely known.
You can't analyze your way into an opportunity you were never shown.
Venture rounds fill through existing relationships. Secondary transactions close within days, offered first to counterparties who've performed before. Growth equity allocations go to investors the founders already know, or to those introduced by people the founders trust. By the time an opportunity circulates broadly, something has usually changed - the terms, the availability, or both.
The pattern isn't hidden. Sponsors with capacity constraints don't run open processes because they don't need to. They call the people they've worked with, confirm interest, and close. Speed and reliability matter more than who has the sharpest memo.
Distribution happens first. Evaluation happens after, but only for those who received the call.
"Access" is a word that gets used loosely. Seeing a deal isn't access. Knowing someone at the fund isn't access. Getting a meeting isn't access.
Access, in any meaningful sense, means three things arriving together: the opportunity comes to you early, there's a real probability you'll get allocated, and you can actually close in the required window. Miss any one of those and you're spectating, not participating.
Plenty of investors see deals. Far fewer are in a position to act on them.
When a round is oversubscribed, and many of the interesting ones are, the sponsor isn't choosing based on who wrote the best analysis. They're choosing based on who they've worked with, who can move quickly, and who won't create problems. The analytical work happens downstream, after the allocation question is already settled.
This is why access shapes outcomes. Not because it guarantees better returns, but because it determines how many real opportunities you get to evaluate in the first place. More shots on goal, in a game where the distribution of outcomes is highly uneven.
Analysis still matters, obviously. Access without judgment leads to sloppy deployment. The investor who says yes to everything they see will underperform the investor who can distinguish between opportunities worth taking and opportunities that just happen to be available.
But analysis can't conjure deals that never arrived. It can't rewind a timeline that closed last week. It can't make a sponsor return your call if you're not on their list.
Analysis converts access into decisions. It doesn't create the opportunity set. That's already been determined before the work begins.
Here's how it actually plays out.
A secondary opportunity surfaces—LP looking to exit, short timeline, clean terms. The sponsor calls four firms they've worked with before. Within a week, it's done. An investor who heard about it ten days later had nothing to decide. The outcome was already settled.
A growth-stage company announces a raise that's oversubscribed before the deck goes out. Insiders and two new investors the CEO already knew take the whole round. Everyone else gets a polite "we'll keep you in mind for the next one." The analysis those other firms would have done, however good, was never going to matter.
These aren't unusual situations. They're the norm in capacity-constrained markets.
There are limits to this argument, and I'll be specific about them.
Access isn't entirely structural. Investors can improve their positioning over time: by writing larger checks, by executing reliably, by building a reputation in a particular domain. Effort and access interact. But that's not the same as saying effort alone overcomes scarcity. The constraint loosens at the margins. It doesn't disappear.
Not all private markets work this way. Some credit strategies, certain real estate funds, and plenty of broadly distributed vehicles don't have the same capacity dynamics. The argument here is specific to venture, growth, and secondaries; markets where relationships and speed tend to dominate.
And sometimes analysis really does drive outcomes. Genuinely novel technologies, emerging sectors with no clear comparables, complex or unusual structures; these situations reward the investor who can evaluate what others can't.
I should also be clear about what this article isn't claiming.
It's not claiming private markets beat public markets. It's not claiming access guarantees good returns. It's not claiming analysis is unimportant, I’ve said the opposite.
And it's not claiming that access is earned, or that lacking it reflects some failure. Access is a structural condition. Some investors have it, others don't, and the reasons often have little to do with merit.
The claim is narrower: in venture, growth, and secondaries, positioning determines the opportunity set before evaluation begins. Sequence matters.
The investor with access but no judgment takes bad risk. The investor with judgment but no access applies their skill to a constrained set of options, or to none at all.
Positioning and analysis work in sequence. Not instead of each other.
OGGI Equity operates within these constraints. We invest our own capital first, and selectively invite qualified individuals to participate alongside us. That's not a claim that we see the best deals or that our access is superior. Rather, it’s simply how we work, as principals, allocating within the structural realities of these markets.
Access determines the opportunity set.
Analysis determines what you do with it.
Our Pre-IPO Stock Checklist covers the evaluation criteria we use when assessing private opportunities—company fundamentals, legal structure, management stability, valuation, and more.