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How Carta grew to $8.5B with an ICP focus

Carta is an equity management platform that helps companies issue shares, save on taxes, and help raise a round. They currently have about 2.5M users and recently raised at a $8.5B valuation.

Product

Before Carta, you’d need to get lawyers to issue stock options or shares. Carta moved that process to the could. They now have equity management products, compensation benchmarks products, venture capital products, and a private stock marketplace. A strong expansion play.

Distribution

In the early days, Carta had a big problem with getting customers. Founders were worried that their investors wouldn’t approve a new untested solution. So Carta changed their ICP focus to investors - it was still hard to sign them but one investor would bring all of their portfolio companies onto Carta (flywheel, baby!).

The other successful change in their GTM was pricing. They moved away from monthly subscriptions to a fee-based model ($20 per stock certificate) that they could easily anchor against lawyer fees to get the same thing done.

Market

Carta’s beachhead market was equity management for startups — currently worth about $1B. Since then they expanded their TAM to target venture capital software and financial services which could be worth billions of dollars. Hard to estimate the TAM but that was the initial goal of Carta’s CEO — to be in the category of one.

Resources

• How Carta Won Their First Customers by Unusual Ventures

• Interview with Carta’s CEO about Transforming Private Markets

• $1 Trillion in Equity: How Carta is Set to Unlock the Private Markets 

• 300 Investor Rejections & 1 Failed Startup Led to a $1B Business

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