Oceanic Partners

CEO Tim Sullivan sets the strategic direction and is accountable for all business execution, including investment mandates. CIO and Senior Analyst Max Morgunov directs the firm's due diligence and investment selection process. Morgunov's prior experience includes a senior due-diligence role at MicroVentures and hedge-fund analysis at SAC Capital Advisors. The firm's website positions Sullivan and Morgunov as the primary investment-committee drivers, supported by a team of five other professionals.

Oceanic points to its leadership's networks built over thousands of executed private transactions at prior firms like SharesPost and MicroVentures. The firm's primary-investment arm participates in direct venture rounds, stating it maintains an expansive reach in the startup ecosystem. It does not publish a systematic sourcing methodology but emphasizes an intelligent, unconstrained approach that is not bound by deal size, geography, or market cycle.

Yes, the secondary market is a core pillar. Oceanic makes principal investments in secondary private-market opportunities and offers liquidity solutions to individual and institutional holders of private equity. It structures these transactions through direct brokerage, managed funds, single-name syndications, synthetic-interest products, and structured employee equity-compensation liquidity plans. This dual primary-and-secondary model is the firm's defining structural feature.

Through its Issuer & Stakeholder Solutions service, Oceanic designs centralized liquidity programs that let private-company employees and stakeholders monetize equity positions. The firm argues that as the private-company lifecycle extends toward a decade on average, structured secondary liquidity becomes a requirement for talent retention. Execution methods include managed funds and bespoke tender-style programs.

CEO Tim Sullivan previously managed more than $5 billion in private equity transactions at SharesPost, Susquehanna Financial Group, Oracle, and IBM. COO Jaclyn Strife was a lead producer at SharesPost, part of a small team that executed over $1 billion in private-share trades, and later a Managing Director at MicroVentures. Their overlapping secondary-market experience at SharesPost — at the time a dominant venue for late-stage private-company stock — forms the operational backbone of Oceanic's strategy.

Oceanic participates from seed through late-stage venture, categorizing its approach as stage-agnostic and adjusting deployment based on the current market environment. The portfolio roster — from early bets like Docusign and Palantir to later-stage names like SpaceX — supports this range. The underlying mandate, however, always prioritizes liquidity opportunities, which likely concentrates activity in later-stage and pre-IPO rounds.

Oceanic is a boutique asset manager, not a registered investment advisor or a single-family office. It operates through four service lines — primary investments, secondary markets, issuer solutions, and select advisory — with an eight-person in-house team and a panel of external legal and broker-dealer advisors. The CEO and COO hold multiple FINRA licenses, and the firm works through affiliated broker-dealer relationships such as Emerson Equity for certain transaction types.