SEC approves the creation of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, or LTSE, a Silicon Valley-based national securities exchange proposed by Eric Ries
if they don't kill each other first Tweets: Alexis Ohanian Sr / @alexisohanian : This is great news: @WSJ reports that @ltse cleared to become 14th U.S. Stock Exchange. Very happy to have @ericries and this team in the @Initialized community. Long-term all the way! https://www.wsj.com/... pic.twitter.com/nBDLGl0FPn Garry / @garrytan : Long Term Stock Exchange is now approved by the SEC!🦄 Let startups go public earlier🙅🏻♂ ️ Prevent short-term corporate raiders from strip-mining small-to-mid-cap IPOs👼🏻 Let the public participate in tech gains🤲🏻 Add transparency/liquidity to startupshttps://t.co/dxKyW2QyAN Guy Kawasaki / @guykawasaki : Interesting idea. U.S. regulators approve new Silicon Valley stock exchange https://www.reuters.com/... Kara Swisher / @karaswisher : This backed by @pmarca is quantumly more interesting than the Uber IPO: SEC approves Silicon Valley stock exchange backed by Marc Andreessen https://www.cnbc.com/... Mike Smerklo / @mikesmerklo : Hard to debate @karaswisher on English, but I agree 100% with her except “quantumly”.. https://twitter.com/... @digitallawrence : Markers are getting interesting now that Silicon Valley is about to have its own stock exchange. Is this where are the Tech IPOs are going? And will they have #Crypto Trading pairs? https://www.cnbc.com/... Ryan Begin / @ryan : Over the last 100 years the US has refined a public market system predicated on short-term thinking / action by its most important companies.This puts our global leadership at risk, and incentivizes exploitation of people and the environment.Its about time for an LTSE. 📈🌈 https://twitter.com/... Christopher Allen / @christophera : Interesting! “One of the platform's unique, and potentially contentious, proposals is its focus on long-term voting rights: the idea is that shareholders will be granted more voting power the longer they own a stock.” https://qz.com/... Heidi N. Moore / @moorehn : What is the “public market's focus in near-term profit”? Is that a joke? First, a lot of “unicorns” (lol) are aged as hell and still unprofitable after years and years. Second, it's the VCs pushing them to be profitable fast or lose funding. https://www.cnbc.com/... Erik Berlin / @sferik : I'm sure someone has made this point already—probably @ericries—but another way to think about LTSE is democratization of venture capital. VC, by its nature, is long-term oriented. Kate Milani / @katemilani : LTSE aims to create a stock exchange that encourages its listed companies to focus on achieving long-term, strategic goals instead of trying to hit quarterly earnings targets. https://www.wsj.com/... via @WSJ @ltse : “We've seen that the strongest founders in our portfolio perform best when they're planning for the next five to 10 years, not just the next quarter,” @briansin tells @aosipovich https://www.wsj.com/... Ryan Hoover / @rrhoover : Huge milestone for @ericries and the @ltse team 👏🏼 https://www.cnbc.com/... Anthony Zhang / @anthonyjz17 : Any takers on a bet that the first company being listed on @ltse is a @ericries or @a16z portfolio company? https://qz.com/... Jesse Powell / @jespow : Can someone ELI5 how LTSE has an advantage or is differentiated beyond geography and imposing more rules on its listed companies? Can't any of the public companies listed on other exchanges optionally adopt the LTSE's requirements? If shareholders care, they can demand anything? https://twitter.com/... Bilal Zuberi / @bznotes : Very interesting. “SEC approves Silicon Valley stock exchange backed by Marc Andreessen” https://www.cnbc.com/... Martin Bryant / @martinsfp : “Ries says the public market's focus on short-term results leads to a decline in innovation, something LTSE wants to reverse.” https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Eric Ries first pitched the idea in [[a:923189|2017, when top Silicon Valley figures backed an exchange that rewards shares with more voting power the longer investors hold them]]. Two years later the SEC has cleared it as the 14th U.S. national securities exchange, converting a governance manifesto into a licensed trading venue.
The approval is also a capital-markets validation: within months LTSE would raise a $50M Series B led by Founders Fund with a16z and Initialized Capital participating, and backers like Alexis Ohanian frame it as a way to let startups go public earlier without exposing small-cap IPOs to short-term raiders.
First-order effects
- LTSE becomes the 14th U.S. national securities exchange, giving issuers a listing venue whose rules tie voting power to holding period rather than share count.
- Startups considering an IPO now have a third major option alongside NYSE and Nasdaq, one explicitly designed around long-term shareholder governance.
Second-order effects
- NYSE and Nasdaq face a rival whose pitch is regulatory design rather than liquidity pricing, forcing the incumbents to defend their own listing standards as the default for tech companies.
- Venture investors who funded LTSE — Founders Fund, a16z, Initialized — gain a potential earlier exit path for portfolio companies, aligning exchange policy with VC liquidity needs.
Third-order effects
- If LTSE's model holds, exchange approval becomes a product-differentiation game: the later 24 Exchange raise for 24/7 trading, awaiting its own SEC decision shows new entrants competing on market structure itself rather than on matching incumbent order books.
- The SEC's willingness to license a values-based exchange signals that listing-rule innovation, not just trade execution, can be a basis for new national exchanges — a structural opening incumbents have not had to defend against in decades.
The trend: U.S. equity-market structure is fragmenting as the SEC approves purpose-built exchanges — long-term voting at LTSE, round-the-clock trading at 24 Exchange — that compete with NYSE and Nasdaq on listing philosophy rather than scale.