Why Tech Workers Are Borrowing Against Their Startup Shares: Techdollar CEO
As tech companies stay private longer, employees are increasingly borrowing against shares to unlock liquidity
By: Zack Guzman
September 10, 2026
Silicon Valley has spent years creating paper millionaires.
Now a new corner of private credit is trying to figure out how to let them spend some of that wealth without selling the shares that made them rich in the first place.
That is the bet behind Techdollar, a startup building lines of credit against equity in privately held technology companies. CEO and Co-Founder Terence McMenamin says the opportunity has emerged from a simple shift in Silicon Valley: startups are getting bigger, but taking much longer to go public.
“There’s a lot of people experiencing paper rich syndrome,” McMenamin told Coinage in a new interview. “Techdollar is all about solving just that, providing people that hold startup equity with lines of credit to improve their quality of life.”
The problem is becoming harder to ignore as some of the most valuable companies in the world remain private deep into their lifecycles. Employees might accumulate millions of dollars worth of stock options or shares, but unlike someone holding stock in a public company like Nvidia, that wealth cannot simply be sold on an exchange whenever a mortgage payment, tax bill or other expense comes due. Nvidia, by contrast, has traded publicly on the Nasdaq since 1999.
McMenamin argues the waiting period for that liquidity has effectively doubled.
“What we used to see would be a five- to six-year timeline to IPO is now stretched towards 11 years,” he said.
That extra five years matters when equity represents a significant chunk of an employee's compensation. A worker may be wealthy enough on paper to buy a house, pay a large tax bill or cover tuition, but still lack the cash necessary to do any of those things.
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The traditional answer has often been to sell some of the shares in a tender offer or on the private secondary market. McMenamin thinks borrowing could increasingly become another option.
Techdollar only lends against vested shares and essentially treats them as collateral for a line of credit. McMenamin described the idea as something akin to a home equity line of credit, except instead of borrowing against the value built up in a house, a borrower is tapping the value accumulated in startup stock.
The distinction is important because selling means surrendering the future upside.
For an employee at the next breakout artificial intelligence or robotics company, that could prove enormously expensive if the company eventually follows the trajectory of public-market winners like Nvidia. Borrowing lets an employee access some liquidity while continuing to own the asset.
“You know, this illiquid life staring at large kind of transformative numbers on paper, but they were just that — paper,” McMenamin said of the experience that led him and his co-founder to start Techdollar. The challenge is convincing someone else that those private shares are reliable enough to lend against.
Unlike Nvidia stock, a stake in a private AI startup does not have a price flashing on an exchange every second. There can also be restrictions on whether shares can be sold or pledged, and determining what happens to the collateral after a borrower defaults can be far more complicated.
McMenamin says that complexity is precisely why traditional lenders have struggled to serve the market.
He and his co-founder approached banks themselves before starting Techdollar and found that many would not lend against the assets at all. When they did receive pricing, McMenamin said rates could reach roughly 20%, making the financing unattractive for many borrowers.
Techdollar is betting it can build a better underwriting model around the companies it believes deserve to be treated differently.
“Our whole thesis, our whole underwriting model is essentially that these are not speculative assets,” McMenamin said, pointing to areas like robotics, chip-adjacent infrastructure, autonomy, defense technology and drones. “These are assets that are civilization scale.”
That is obviously still a bet.
Private-company valuations can fall, and even enormously promising technologies do not guarantee enormously successful companies. Techdollar attempts to manage that risk by looking at secondary-market pricing rather than relying solely on the valuation from a company's last financing round.
McMenamin said Techdollar works with private-market data providers to monitor where shares are actually trading and can adjust credit lines as those valuations change.
“There is a mark,” he said. “It doesn't have to be marked to the last funding round. It's not stale. We can see where these things are trading. We can give dynamic credit lines that flex upwards or downwards based on how these things are trading in the secondary market.”
Borrowers, he said, are currently taking loans averaging roughly 20% to 30% of the value of their collateral, even though Techdollar can permit higher loan-to-value ratios. McMenamin said the company's pipeline was approaching $800 million to $900 million worth of collateral at the time of the interview.
But underwriting the asset is only half of the equation. Techdollar also needs someone willing to fund the loan.
That is where crypto enters the story.
Rather than attempting to tokenize Anthropic shares or recreate private stocks on a blockchain, Techdollar is exploring whether the substantial pools of capital already sitting onchain can be connected with this new form of private credit.
McMenamin argues that the pitch could be especially compelling for investors hunting for dollar-denominated yield. Techdollar is exploring structures that would allow lenders to fund senior secured loans backed by private shares, with McMenamin saying the company is targeting returns to liquidity providers north of 12% after Techdollar's fees.
“You're paying in dollars, you're earning back dollars, you're not earning a third token,” he said.
If a borrower defaults, Techdollar's job is to sell the underlying shares and use the proceeds to repay the lender. The company works with issuers ahead of time to navigate transfer restrictions and potential buyers, McMenamin said, rather than assuming the collateral can simply be liquidated after something goes wrong.
It is a decidedly less crypto-native approach than simply putting private stocks onchain.
McMenamin is fine with that.
“We get a little ahead of ourselves, I think, in crypto land,” he said. “There's improvements on products. And that doesn't mean the existing legacy system will cease to exist.”
That philosophy increasingly has precedent in the public markets.
Figure Technology Solutions (FIGR), which McMenamin referenced during the interview, has built a publicly traded business around using blockchain infrastructure to improve lending and capital markets rather than trying to replace financial products altogether. Figure describes itself as a “blockchain-native capital marketplace,” with products spanning loan origination, credit markets and onchain lending.
McMenamin sees Techdollar in a similar camp.
“A lot of our borrowers don't even know that there's a crypto element to it,” he said. “Super intentional by design.”
Borrowers could ultimately receive the proceeds in traditional dollars or stablecoins such as USDC, he said. The blockchain matters more on the back end, where Techdollar sees an opportunity to connect capital searching for yield with borrowers sitting on valuable but illiquid assets.
If Techdollar is right, the bigger story may have less to do with crypto than with what is happening to private markets themselves.
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