Gonna go into a bit of a rant about Carta because I know the space way too well and I've had a couple glasses of Riesling. It's been interesting to watch as Ca

Gonna go into a bit of a rant about Carta because I know the space way too well and I've had a couple glasses of Riesling. It's been interesting to watch as Carta's been derailed from their initial ambition of unseating Computershare/Broadridge for the business of stock transfer agency. It's his company, but if you actually read the SeriesA decks that he's quoting from, Ward's representation that they raised initial financing on the vision of "the Nasdaq for private markets" is quite an imaginative retelling of history. The plan was clearly to "climb the food chain" up to Computershare. [0] Their first derailment was getting into the business of stock options in the US, and the associated revenues from 409(a) valuations (still substantially all their revenue, I think). This made sense because they were in the startup world, and had a lot of startup clients issuing employee options. They tried to stick with the TA market by buying Philadelphia Stock Transfer in 2018, and launching their entry into the public company business with great fanfare [1]. However, the guy they hired to do it left in a year [2], and PST is still running on the laughably archaic system TranStar [3], when Carta could make a better system than TranStar with a team of two in their sleep. I'm pretty sure it's basically that their ambitions (and those of their VCs) are just too big, and being "the next Computershare" isn't a big enough business, despite Computershare's $8B market cap. Companies are staying private longer and longer, and being a service provider to public companies just isn't that cool anymore. It's a shame because I actually think having better public company services would make it a lot easier for startups to go public earlier. But pretty much every transfer agent, including Computershare and AST, seems to think bigger private markets are the future. [0] https://www.slideshare.net/razinmustafiz/eshares-series-a-pitch-deck https://www.slideshare.net/razinmustafiz/eshares-series-a-pi... [1] https://carta.com/blog/meet-carta-for-public-companies/ https://carta.com/blog/meet-carta-for-public-companies/ [2] https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-harrigan-96151021/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-harrigan-96151021/ [3] https://shareholderaccountingsoftware.com/pst/irlogin https://shareholderaccountingsoftware.com/pst/irlogin