Inside the ICE House · Oct 8, 2026 · 32m · 18m saved
With Scott Voss, Managing Director and Senior Market Strategist at HarbourVest Partners
Private markets have beaten public market benchmarks by 300 to 500 basis points over the last 15 years, Scott Voss said, but public markets have done better over the past three to five years.
Voss said the liquidity, transparency and price discovery now coming to private markets could wear away some of the advantages that let them outperform, and that the top question HarbourVest hears from chief investment officers in boardrooms is what happens if public markets keep winning.
"If that happens for ten years, then I think there's a bit of a reckoning that the private markets need to have." — Scott Voss
Scott Voss, Managing Director and Senior Market Strategist at HarbourVest Partners, on Inside the ICE House, the New York Stock Exchange's podcast, presented the firm's 2026 mid-year private markets outlook, which ties together seven themes. HarbourVest invests through other managers' funds, including the infrastructure funds he discussed.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 32 minutes of audio, 14 minutes of reading.
Here are the 12 arguments that matter.
Key Takeaways
Macro causes now move together while portfolio outcomes scatter, which HarbourVest calls idiosynchronicity
Nearly 90% of just over $350B of venture money in the first half of 2026 went to AI, he said
The companies that build AI infrastructure may not be the ones that profit from it
The IPO window is open against 2023 to 2025 but not against 2021, and it is highly selective
SpaceX alone raised $86B of the $150B to $200B Goldman expects this year
Cheap debt is gone, so private equity returns will come from running companies better rather than from leverage
AI could lift a basic-industry company's net margin from 2% to 5% up to 10% to 15%, he said
Private markets' 300 to 500 basis point edge is not guaranteed once their assets trade more like public ones
Ocean trade, AI and space add up to close to $100T of investment in places with few rules
1. Synchronized Causes
The host said HarbourVest's 2026 mid-year report describes a market that is synchronous in cause and idiosyncratic in consequence, and asked what that means.
HarbourVest joined two words to describe 2026: synchronicity and idiosyncratic
The team could not find one word for the moment, Voss said, so it combined the two into "idiosynchronicity." In 2025 the headlines were tariffs, interest rates, inflation, geopolitics and AI, and those forces seemed to move together whether they were related or not.
In early 2026 the effects arrived unevenly. He listed the fear that AI would disrupt software business models, the fear of contagion in private credit, and the war in Iran that sent oil prices up.
"All of a sudden we had to translate the macro to our portfolio, and it wasn't like everything behaved the same — it was very idiosyncratic." — Scott Voss
A colleague likes to say the handoff between macro and micro is rarely clean, he said, and the macro is back in the headlines now: the Fed is raising interest rates, oil is at $106 a barrel and the 10-year Treasury yield is at 5%. The outlook ties seven themes together, which he described as a tether wound tight at the macro end and frayed at the portfolio end.
