
Carta for Public Companies - gwintrob
https://medium.com/@henrysward/carta-for-public-companies-b256e873aaa3
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coreyoconnor
Carta is "software to help companies, investors, law firms, and employees
modernize the way they manage ownership"

The homepage is [https://carta.com/](https://carta.com/)

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.

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

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deyan
>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

~~~
kornish
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...](https://www.ft.com/content/ae9e6500-e69b-11e7-8b99-0191e45377ec)

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paxy
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?

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bradgessler
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.

~~~
nedwin
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.

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bradgessler
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.

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skybrian
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?

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ikeboy
>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.

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

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

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visarga
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?

