The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 36 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Ward: Carta projects $600M base ARR up to $10B revenue by 2025
“Our base case, if none of our bets work out, we think we'll be around six hundred million in ARR, growing 50 to 70% year over year as a software business. If some of our more financial products that we're working on hit, We have a broad spectrum. These are hig…”
Ward: Carta will acquire and convert services firms into software businesses
“We'll buy as many services firms as we can that we can turn into software businesses.”
Ward: Carta will only enter markets where it can achieve monopoly status
“When we look at markets to go after, we really have three requirements. One is this has to be an end of one market. We won't enter a market that we think can be fractured where we would face competition to, we have to have some innovation on the business model…”
Ward: Cap table software is an N-of-1 market with one winner
“People looked at it as a, this is a small market, so it must be uninteresting. And what we looked at it is because of the network effect of this market, this is an end of one market. There will be one and only one platform for this.”
Ward: Founders are irreplaceable because they hold the company vision
“But in these mission oriented and vision oriented companies, The founder is the keeper of the mission, and so you can build all these functional pieces around the founder, but the one thing that's very hard to replace is the keeper of the vision, and so it's s…”
Ward: VC fundraising should be structured as a compressed auction
“Fundraising in private markets and venture is an auction process. And so aggregating the auction into a short period of time is part of the strategy because you want to create an auction. You want to create competition. You don't want to drag this out and do t…”
Henry Ward: Multi-product strategy accelerates network effect convergence
“If you believe in the network effects of our business, it's a much more powerful paradigm to execute on multiple fronts of this network because the network converges faster.”
O'Driscoll: Top decile seed valuations surged 6x from new AI categories
“Ordinary pricing has gone up 10, 20%, but top decile pricing has gone up six X or something like that, and that's really just a function of there are a class of bet that, frankly, didn't exist five years ago.”
Sim: Seed valuations were the only startup stage to increase since 2021
“There's data from Carta that shows you that if you look at priced rounds from Q one of 20, 21 compared to, let's say Q four of last year, the only round that increased in valuation Was the seed round”
Strange: Carta is uniquely positioned to build private securities exchange CartaX
“The vision for Carta X is right now you can be public and very liquid and private and very illiquid. What would be the platform or the stock exchange, so to speak, of private and liquid? And who best execute on that than the company that has the system of reco…”
Hashtag Angels and Carta study finds women hold only 9% of equity
“When we partnered with Carta to measure the gap on the cap table, aka the gap table, we found that only nine percent of equity value goes towards women, and that's looking at over 6000 companies, 15,000 founders, 180,000 employees”
Narrative matters more than KPIs in successful fundraising
“For the best businesses ever, and also for the most successful fundraisers, what matters more is the narrative that you're able to tell, and then you have KPIs which are, you know, backing up the narrative that you're sharing with.”
Messerschmidt: Carta allocated over $8M in equity to correct gender inequality
“He measured his own cap table and he realized that it was not equal. And so he took swift action and he allocated more than eight million dollars in additional equity awards to women to correct the inequalities.”
Hsu: Slack and Carta didn't build dedicated data teams until Series C
“I just want to think back to Slack and Carter, two companies that we've worked with, you know, in the last couple of years, you know, both of them didn't really start investing in this Full bore, you know, well into about the series C, if I remember correctly.…”
Ward: Carta decouples R&D development from product business cases
“At Carta, the way we think about R and D and businesses, we decouple those two discussions. Many businesses will say, Hey, we want to launch a new product to market. You know, what can we charge for it? What's the profitability of this product, et cetera. And …”
Henry Ward: Founders don't need a high decision batting average to succeed
“And that's been true of me is that I've been wrong more than I've been right. My superpower is I'm very quick to realize it and fix the mistake. So the damage is, I do a good job of damage control on my mistake, but when I am right, I may not have a high batti…”
Ward: Carta's 409A valuation business operates at over 70% gross margins
“So that today our four nine a business runs at over 70% margins.”
Stebbings: The top 5% of seed rounds now hit $200M valuations
“The top five percent of seed rounds hit two hundred million dollar valuation.”
O'Driscoll: Carta data shows dilution per round is decreasing
“The only fact-based comment I'll make is, you know, the data from Carter, which is always excellent, says that dilution per round is going down.”
O'Driscoll: Carta data shows 18% of 2018 Series Bs returned over 5x
“What it told people for listeners is they looked at all 547, 2018 series B investments, and then they did a histogram of where they come out in less than a one X, you know, one to a two X. Oh, that was series B. So 547, and then, you know, 20, 18% of them grea…”
Stebbings: Carta Data Shows Series A Funding Rounds Down 81%
“Carter just announced that Series A's are down 81%.”
Multi-product cross-selling reduces customer acquisition cost close to zero
“And I think that's a reason a lot of these companies that you see today have uncontrollable burn rates, because the only way that they are growing is spending money on customer acquisition channels that they don't actually have a lot of control over. And as a …”
Carta grew its second product to $10M revenue in under 14 months
“But the product that we built, it went from zero to ten million dollars of revenue in under 14 months.”
Small initial markets let startups achieve early dominance before expanding
“Where it doesn't matter is where, you know, you have a company like Carta where, yeah, the initial market size is small, but that's actually a good feature of this because it means that you can dominate that small market very early, and when finders have clari…”
Launching new products requires pairing domain experts with company insiders
“There's a blend you need to have between finding the right domain experts wherever inside of the company or outside the company and bring them on board. And then also working with people that have been at the company and understand your existing customers, und…”
Henry Ward: A late-stage CEO's job reduces to storytelling and executive hiring
“My job increasingly becomes very specialized. And it's really about two things. One is telling our story to candidates, employees, investors, press, and then two is recruiting executives and keeping the right executives in the right place.”
Henry Ward: Unexplained decisions are almost worse than no decisions
“Because if you're making decisions and nobody knows why, that's almost worse than not making the decision.”
Henry Ward: Seed stage needs rapid decisions; late stage requires precision
“When you're in the early seed stages, making decisions quickly, learning quickly, being active, and making decisions on the front lines with information that you have, and adjusting quickly is an asset. At the later stages, there are fewer decisions to make on…”
Ward: Very few startup executives voluntarily admit reaching their scaling limit
“Very few executives will raise their hand and say they feel like they're tapping out.”
Henry Ward: Carta serves 10,000 companies, adding 400 monthly
“You know, we have 10,000 companies. We're acquiring about 400 a month today.”
Henry Ward: Small market size was Carta's biggest investor criticism
“The biggest investor criticism of Carta has always been small markets.”
Ward: Carta monetizes investor products to subsidize early-stage founders
“We may look at investor products and say, we can provide a lot of value for investors and we can deliberately decide that we're going to extract a lot of that value too. And the extraction of that value will subsidize other areas where we want to leave more co…”
Strange: Startups can become systems of record through two main strategies
“Becoming a system of record can be stage one of your business, which Carta very cleverly figured out, but it could also be a Stage two of your business, which is solve a very valuable problem for a customer that they're willing to pay for, and over time, you e…”
Carta is adding 1% of the US venture ecosystem monthly
“And we're adding, call it a percent of the ecosystem a month to Carta at this point in the US.”
Carta was not the first cap table management company
“And example, I'll use the Henry where he didn't start the first cap table company and nor was he actually building a cap table company from day one. And there, there'd been a dozen or so companies over the last two decades that had been started to go after thi…”
Messerschmidt: #Angels syndicate has invested in over 100 startups
“And now, nearly five years later, we've invested in more than a hundred companies as a group, and those companies include Bird, Cameo, Gusto, Carta, Airtable, Lambda School, Carrot Fertility, Modern Fertility, Vector Space, and countless more.”