This week I sit down with Will Duckett, co-founder and COO of Equity Shift, an NC Tweener Fund portfolio company building the infrastructure behind private market secondaries. It's a good mix of both worlds with real company detail (broker-dealer licensing, cap table complexity, go-to-market) alongside the founder lessons that come with seven years of building through two economic shocks. If you've ever wondered what actually happens when a private equity firm buys a company out from under 8,000 employees, this one's for you.
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Who is Will?
Will Duckett is co-founder and COO of Equity Shift, a Raleigh-based fintech building the technology and regulatory infrastructure for secondary liquidity in private markets. Will grew up in North Carolina and studied entrepreneurship and ancient Roman history at UNC Chapel Hill, then spent about four years in the back office of a fund of hedge funds in New York before earning his MBA at Columbia Business School. He moved home to North Carolina to start a family and work in private-business operations, including a stint at menswear brand Peter Millar, before co-founding Equity Shift with Tom in 2019. Today he’s also co-Chief Compliance Officer for the company’s FINRA-registered broker-dealer, and leads customer success, operations, and, in the early days a lot of the marketing too.
Highlights
The origin story: Will met co-founder Tom Gordon at a blockchain working group in 2018; Tom previously built the online hotel reservation technology behind modern travel booking and sold it to Travelocity.
41 patents: Equity Shift holds roughly 41 U.S. patents describing how blockchain, or as Will prefers, “immutable ledger technology,” can underpin digital private markets.
The pitch in one line: “Think of it as almost a digital operating system for a private business or a private entity.”
The Carta line: On how Equity Shift differs from cap table incumbents: “This is Carta that keeps itself as you use it to actually do the work.”
The SpaceX cautionary tale: SpaceX reportedly went public without knowing all of its own shareholders after secondary shares were resold through daisy-chained SPVs, the kind of regulatory risk Will says Equity Shift is designed to prevent.
The market math: Secondaries account for roughly 2% of total AUM in private markets, compared with about 95% secondary trading volume in public markets, a massive gap Equity Shift is chasing.
Finding the bigger space: After realizing Carta had already saturated the roughly 60,000 to 100,000 VC-backed companies, Will and Tom targeted what they estimate is a market of 15 million private U.S. businesses, ultimately focusing on private-equity-backed buyout companies.
The taxi medallion analogy: Mentor Bill Spruell told Will to think of FINRA broker-dealer registration “like a New York City taxi cab medallion,” painful to obtain, but a durable asset once you have it.
Team and traction: Equity Shift has grown from a two-person founding team to 26 people, became a registered broker-dealer in 2021, and now works with some of the world’s largest private equity firms and asset managers.
Founder advice: “Just think of it being at least 2 times harder than you think it will be.” After seven years, Will’s biggest lessons include relentlessness and the value of having a co-founder to share the load.
Building in North Carolina: Will sees the state as a great place to build a company and hire talent, but says raising local capital for a big, ambitious idea has been harder, something he hopes changes as more successful NC outcomes recycle wealth back into the ecosystem.
Seven years, two economic shocks, and 41 patents later, Will’s still convinced private markets are headed digital. Enjoy the conversation.
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