The key innovation of evergreen funds for individual investors isn't just liquidity, but the upfront, fully-funded structure. This removes the operational complexity of managing capital calls and distributions—a major historical barrier for even wealthy individuals who found the process too complicated.
Before GPs can successfully tap into the retail market, they must recognize the immense operational costs. Managing, reporting for, and administering funds with thousands of small investors has a high break-even point. Without the ability to achieve significant scale, the economics of these products are unworkable.
Serving thousands of individual investors requires a huge investment in "nuts and bolts" infrastructure for administration, processing, and reporting. This operational complexity and cost, not client-facing apps, is the primary hurdle for GPs entering the retail space, moving from analog processes to complex digital systems.
The continuous monthly inflows of successful evergreen funds create immense pressure to deploy capital quickly. In slow deal markets, this forces a difficult choice: halt inflows and kill momentum, or risk performance dilution from cash drag or investing in lower-quality assets to meet deployment targets.
While retail investors may demand daily pricing for private assets, this eliminates the "hidden benefit" of illiquidity that historically forced a long-term perspective. Constant valuation updates could encourage emotional, short-term trading, negating a core advantage of the asset class: staying the course.