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The liquidity of startup shares has gotten better in recent times. I'm an engineer at http://www.equityzen.com, a marketplace for pre-IPO shares, and I believe more shareholders are starting to see that selling before an exit is a viable option for faster liquidity.

We helped lobby and push for this bill and I'm glad to see it making progress in providing better options for startup employees.

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The second market is a bandaid. In addition to sub-par prices there's a huge bottleneck in the demand for shares, which is extremely volatile. And if cofounder X decides to offload 10% of his shares it'll wipe out any demand there is.

Equity is awful for a lot of reasons, but I'll never be convinced second-market selling is the panacea.

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