Carta for Public Companies | Hacker News Reader

Carta for Public Companies

medium.com

48 pointsgwintrob15 comments

Carta is "software to help companies, investors, law firms, and employees modernize the way they manage ownership"

Or it's "Charleston Area Regional Transportation Authority". ;-) I find it's amazing how many of these type of announcements fail to provide even the slightest into to their little bubble.

They were called eShares before. But couldn't secure the domain name...So changed their name to something unrelated

They distribute/track/convert shares/options to employees on behalf of the companies that pay them.

>Today, we have 15–20 Carta Private companies in the pipeline preparing to go public in 2018.

If true, this is an incredible achievement given how long they have been in the market with this product and how few companies IPO. Kudos

Looks like last year, 160 companies IPO'd in the US and it seems that 2018 is predicted to be an IPO-heavy year [0]. Given that Carta seems to be one of the more mature and heavily capitalized cap table SaaS solutions, ~10% market share doesn't sound unreasonable (and is certainly a great achievement!). If this year is great for IPOs, congrats them on a boom time.

[0]: https://www.ft.com/content/ae9e6500-e69b-11e7-8b99-0191e4537...

Why would you put an official company announcement on a medium.com domain? Is there any way to verify that the person/blog is who they say they are?

Meanwhile they have killed off the low-end of their market (and potential flow of new customers) by getting rid of their pricing pages and switching up to a “call sales; request a demo” model.

I can’t stand it when SaaS companies do this. I get yield management, but when Boeing and SpaceX have pricing pages it feels like a sleazy move. I know I know, their list prices are high, but at least you know what you’re getting into.

Please, if you run a SaaS company, don’t turn to the dark side by removing prices. Increase them by a lot and change up the offering, but just keep a list price anywhere. If you don’t then you just create an opportunity for a new company to vacuum up all of your future business.

I’ve been thinking about this lately and I think the challenge is that your competitors in sales calls can reference and undercut your public pricing easily.

This assumes your customer segment shops around and are price sensitive.

That’s true for very simple products, the most extreme example being a commodity, but SaaS is very easy to differentiate via branding, features, service offerings, product assortment, etc. Carta appears to be a very high quality product that could command a premium over some other smaller cap table SaaS I’ve seen out there.

Also, sophisticated buyers that are not price sensitive will shop around to get the best terms. Very large organizations with big budgets will run through an RFP process where the price comes out anyway.

At the end of the day a price isn’t a secret. Hiding it just makes figuring it out more of a pain in the neck for a person evaluating a product.

This. We hear a lot about Carta's pricing from Captable.io customers. Some folks wouldn't sign up because they couldn't believe our pricing page.

Disclaimer: I work at LTSE but not on Captable.io

How would the CEO know the customers for stock purchased through a brokerage? Wouldn't they just know that X shares of stock are being held by an unknown number of people at the brokerage? Or does the information pass through?

>Hostile takeovers and LBOs don’t exist.

Why not? A group of shareholders can team up to get rid of the founder and force a sale.

They’re selling to founders. You can still arrange a consortium to acquire majority interest to perform a takeover.

Reads like a sales pitch to would be acquirers. Not A bad thing. Just curious.

Hey, article author, please spend a few words at the beginning defining your product. I shouldn't have to read multiple screens or Google search to find out.

So, WTF is Carta? Could be a software, could be the name of a new bill, could be a company, maybe it's just a nice Italian lunch menu, a shopping cart brand (physical or virtual), or a competitor for Google Books? A modern day peace treaty?

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