Milan Reinartz: Founder to Platform Builder, Community-Led Angel Investing & Scaling Private Access – E565

"Now, what's interesting is that this asset class of investing in companies in late-stage unicorns in the US—like SpaceX, Perplexity, OpenAI, Anduril—these are probably names that a lot of people have heard before. But generally, you can only really buy them on platforms like Forge or EquityZen, which are US secondary trading platforms. Here, you'll encounter a wide variety in price per share, oftentimes trading above the primary price, meaning the price at which the company has raised money. It's also very difficult to access at ten- to twenty-thousand-dollar check sizes, and the companies themselves may not necessarily like that—they don’t want their information flooded in the market. If you're a larger family office, you can go to Macquarie Bank or other banks or brokers in the US and buy a larger block of shares. But even then, let’s say you're worth ten or twenty million dollars—would you really put half a million into SpaceX? If that’s five percent of your net worth, it's still probably too high a chunk for a single asset class." - Milan Reinartz, CEO at NonPublic

"And we figured that here in Southeast Asia, you actually have almost an oversaturation of funds, not enough exit liquidity downstream, and therefore it's quite a difficult game to play. There hopefully will be some winners and some fund managers who will show significant returns and DPI—distributions per capital—back to their LPs, to their investors. But at this point, this isn't really a proven-out thesis, right? And so, from a fund manager's point of view, at some point you have to go after larger family offices—ideally institutional capital, sovereign funds, et cetera. And that didn’t seem to us as an easy thing to do. And so we were thinking, okay, what does the market need, and what are the problems in the market in terms of early-stage investing? And that led us on a path of really focusing more on a platform business, where we figured, hey, what if we could build technology that provides more transparency and more liquidity to investors within this whole realm of early stage?" - Milan Reinartz, CEO at NonPublic

"The intellectual side of investing is actually super interesting because, when I was working in advertising technology, basically I would wake up every morning and think about how can I show more ads to people—how can I make sure that people buy more burgers or shampoo or whatever the advertiser wants to sell, which, obviously, there's a big market there. But you're basically looking at one problem all the time. And the interesting thing about investing is you really shift your focus a lot between different verticals, because industries change so quickly and technology changes so quickly. So now, I'm probably deeper on some other verticals than ad tech because of investing. My brain is constantly stimulated by looking at all these different verticals. I really enjoyed it, and I wanted to spend my time full time on the subject matter of investing." - Milan Reinartz, CEO at NonPublic

Jeremy Au reconnects with Milan Reinartz to explore how angel investing evolved into a community-led platform, why Southeast Asia’s VC math doesn’t work, and how late-stage private markets offer new opportunities for retail millionaires. They talk through founder quality, opaque incentives, and the need for real diligence in a fragmented region. It’s a grounded take on what needs to change in early-stage investing and what’s already shifting.