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 42 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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: Meeting VC associates and providing casual updates wastes founders' time
“Spending time with associates. I think that's Tends to be a waste of time. And I think meeting with investors to give them updates, I think that is also a waste of time.”
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…”
VC failure rates are unnecessarily high because funds only seek home runs
“I actually challenge the notion that VCs have to have such a high failure rate. I think Part of the reason there is such a high failure rate is because everyone's swinging for home runs. No one's, no one, there are very few VCs that feel like they can assemble…”
Ward: Executive half-life is short because companies scale non-linearly
“Companies scale non-linearly, but people scale linearly. And that's why executive half-life is so short.”
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: 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: 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…”
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.”
Ward: Product advantages decay quickly; sustained growth requires distribution control
“Product and technology advantage is short lived. Your product decays, new entrants want to come in with a better, smarter version, all of those things. And so what keeps the best companies growing bigger and bigger is not product development, but owning the li…”
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: Equity grows exponentially while payroll accumulates linearly, causing wealth inequality
“Payroll is a debt product. With bi-monthly coupons, equity is a capital product, and in any economy, whether it's GDP for the nation or the Silicon Valley economy, any economy that's growing, by definition, equity accumulates exponentially, but debt accumulate…”
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…”
Ward: Asking prospective VC investors for pre-investment work tests their quality
“Founders are afraid to ask investors to do work. I think that because they'll turn them off, I would use that actually as a great litmus test to turn them off, because if they don't want to do any work to earn the right to invest, they're not a good investor.”
Ward: Startup founders must accept constant fires and let non-critical issues burn
“Sometimes you just have to let things burn, and it was super powerful for me, because it left me off the hook of, I have to fix everything today, that I can let things burn, and understand that there's always going to be forest fires, and being patient, and ha…”
Seed investors optimize for Series A appeal over inherently great ideas
“At the seed round, investors aren't necessarily looking for what's a great idea. What they're looking for is what a Series A investor will think is a great idea.”
Startups should win small markets concentrically rather than tackle huge TAMs
“We're very much a, let's win in small markets, and then concentrically grow out of that, rather than try to take on a huge market all at once.”
Henry Ward argues much of venture capital is simply momentum investing
“I think a lot of venture is momentum investing.”
Capital markets suffer from public hyper-liquidity but zero private liquidity
“I think one of the big problems structurally in the capital markets world today is we have an environment of hyper liquidity in the public universe, and then zero liquidity in the private. And there's literally nothing in between right now.”
Great enduring companies will remain privately held rather than going public
“I think when we look 20 years ahead our vision for the world is that the great enduring companies will actually be privately held and they will find liquidity in private markets rather than public markets.”
Ward: Crypto companies are financed exactly like 19th-century railroads
“So we finance crypto companies today no differently than we finance the railroads.”
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…”
Henry Ward: Board management tools drive non-linear SaaS product growth
“We're now tying board members to companies, so this is a strong link between venture funds into the companies, and it's the type of product that, because it focuses on that link, it becomes a non-linear growth pattern, as opposed to, for example, four nine A, …”
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.”
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 …”
Obvious but non-existent startup ideas scare investors rather than excite them
“There was sort of this kind of, I think pessimism or even a little bit of distrust where this idea seems so obvious to people that because it didn't exist, there must be something wrong with this idea that they didn't know. And so, it actually, you would think…”
VCs accept execution and team risk but refuse to take market risk
“Almost all VCs will tell you they will take on execution risk. They'll even take on team risk. But they'll never take market risk, because that's the one thing they can't do anything about, which is why VCs tend to look for really big markets.”
Startups staying private longer is a permanent structural shift
“The time it takes to build a company these days at the scale that venture and our investors would like us to build companies at just takes longer and longer. It's harder the journey's longer, and it's much more expensive. So I think, and I think that trend's g…”
Management and investor alignment is stronger in private markets than public
“I think one of the reasons that private companies work well and are working better and better is that the alignment of management and investors is more highly aligned in the private world than they are in the public world.”
Startup cost of capital is high due to a lack of regulation
“One of the reasons that I think cost of capital for startups is so high is because there's lack of regulation.”
Public market regulation is an illogical patchwork driven by historical fraud
“You can tie almost any regular regulation in the public market model to somebody got defrauded. And so we put in this rule to make that happen. And it's a patchwork of rules that holistically don't make a ton of sense.”
The Silicon Valley talent war will be won with equity over salary
“I think the talent war at Silicon Valley would be one with Better equity comp than salary comp.”
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: 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: 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…”
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: Small market size was Carta's biggest investor criticism
“The biggest investor criticism of Carta has always been small markets.”
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.”
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…”
Early investors criticized eShares for lacking a billion-dollar outcome path
“And that's been true for us for the beginning is that investor criticism of eShares is there isn't line of sight to a big outcome.”
eShares extended its employee equity vesting schedule from four to five years
“We changed our best employee vesting schedule from four years to five years”