Carta

“I actually just read a Carta report today. I don't know if you saw it, but the graduation rate from seed to Series A is now at an all-time low, and before it was like in a normal year, they'd say like, 20 to 25% graduation rate. Now it's at 13.”

“Carta actually just put out a report, I covered it in Sorcery, that LPs are committing less to the category, about 50% are not going to be allocating to venture anymore.”

“Essentially there's 200 plus companies in tech that are like seed all the way to series B that have been acquired year to date, which is up 200% year over year.”

“Carta put out a report a couple months ago on different LP trends, and about 50% are not allocating into venture anymore, and so that, that's being cut away.”

“Alpha is what we consider things that we have control over, and beta is things that we don't. So beta is like market. You know, if we lose a customer because they're going out of business or, you know, the market's down, that's beta. You know, it affects our o…”

“If you can build a software company selling to startups you can build a software company selling to anybody.”

“Yeah, about 2500 venture funds, about 35,000 startups.”

“I think there's like two types of startups. There's innovation startups and execution startups. So an execution startup is like a rippling or a MongoDB, where it's just like, if you build a better database or a better HRIS system, you have line of sight to bil…”

“We'll probably do two or three deals this year, another two or three next year.”

“And that's always been our thesis is start in small markets, win something that nobody else cares about, and then concentrically grow.”

“If we get to a billion bucks, I think it's cause we caught fire in private equity. If we get to two to three billion bucks, it means we've gotten into other asset classes.”

“So now we have agents all night going through testing all the different possible things that a customer might do the next morning when they wake up, and then we catch the errors before they do.”

“And now we're, you know, 20 plus percent grower at scale.”

“I think product portfolio management in companies is much like Venture Live.”

“Today I spend half my time on product and the other half on AI projects at Carta and all the AI projects come in two forms. One is how do we use AI to build differentiated user experiences for our customers? So it's all in the product side. And then how do we …”

“What I tell the team about how to build AI products is you got to follow two rules. One is differentiated customer experience that we couldn't do before AI existed. Like you do something for the customer that literally we could not have done a year ago. Just, …”

“We started with a sales team that sold, you know, 6000 dollar cap tables to 24 year old founders in hoodies you know, in Soma. And now we're selling million dollar accounting solutions to middle aged CFOs in midtown.”

“Internally, I try never to talk about those things cause those are the outputs of the business. we spend all our time talking about the inputs of the business and what are the various flywheels of Carta.”

“We're on the second half of an S-curve in venture, but the beginning of an S-curve in private equity and private credit. And that's driving a lot of the, I think the next two to five years of growth.”

“One of the biggest mistakes that startups and CEOs when they launch new products make is they have such a great sales motion. They can push a product out to market that doesn't have a strong product market fit, but it feels like it does initially. And then it'…”

“The market size of private equity is six to eight times the size of venture.”

“What makes venture unique as an asset class for us is that it has what I'll call a global topology. You know, you bring a company on to Carta because all the investors are minority holders. They bring a bunch of investors. They bring 20 investors. And then tho…”

“My expectation, my hope is in three to five years, how Carta is sort of synonymous with infrastructure for venture in three to five years, it'll be synonymous with infrastructure for PE.”

“Did you know, by the way, on Carta, like, the median time to raise for a Series B to a Series C is 18 to 24 months?”

“There's some interesting Carta data around this cycle in AI, and there is a premium that AI native companies are getting, and it's more dramatic in the Series A and Series B.”

“Carta has some, like, incredible data on this that 41% of companies seen in Serie A, Series A are all AI, quote, unquote, AI companies.”

“Turns out highly concentrated funds, typically like 20 companies per portfolio. Outperforms spray and pray, but spray and pray looks pretty good.”

“There's also data in Carta that 30, that series A companies get a 30% premium on them compared to if they're AI versus non AI.”

“Carta just put out recent data in their fund performance report, and series A's are getting a 30% premium. What do they attribute that to? AI. So, AI companies get a 30% premium versus non-AI companies.”

“Carta put out a recent report that Series A's that are AI enabled, or AI in their name, are getting a 30% premium.”

“I actually met Peter in person recently and he told me he literally just took the job at Carta because of the data access that he would get.”