Ira Landlord

The private equity secondary market — where institutional investors buy and sell limited partnership interests in PE funds to create liquidity — has grown from a niche into a $100 billion+ annual market. Ira Landlord was among the pioneers at Goldman Sachs who built programs to facilitate this secondary trading, helping create liquidity solutions for institutional investors in private equity. Goldman's Petershill program, which buys stakes in alternative asset management firms, was also part of this innovation in providing institutional investors access to the GP economics of successful funds. The growth of the secondary market has been one of the most significant structural changes in institutional investing, as it has made the PE asset class more accessible and liquid. The development of GP-led secondary transactions — where fund managers themselves initiate liquidity events for their investors — further expanded the market and created new categories of secondaries specialists focused on these more complex structured transactions.