Carta And Salt Lake City: Why?

By Mike Wu, Head of People, Carta.

This article was originally published in the Spring 2018 edition of Silicon Slopes Magazine.

Silicon Valley is a great place to start a tech company. But it can be a difficult place to scale one, especially when the mission of a company is to create seven billion owners, map the global ownership network, and unlock private market liquidity. With such ambitious goals, Carta needed to add more locations to attract talent, scale quickly, and keep costs low.

At the end of 2017, Carta expanded operations to Salt Lake City with this in mind. Utah is a business-friendly state, and Salt Lake is full of young and talented financial professionals graduating from schools like BYU and the University of Utah. Utah-based companies raised $623 million from private investors in 2016 and $627 million in the first three quarters of 2017. The growth in private market funding and Utah’s industrial banking infrastructure positioned Salt Lake as an optimal place to scale Carta’s operations. The proximity to Park City, Snowbird, and Alta didn’t hurt, and neither did the short ninety-minute flight to San Francisco.

The business and logistical arguments were too compelling. Salt Lake City was the clear choice for Carta’s largest planned office.

We moved into our new space across from the Salt Palace on the seventh floor of 175 South West Temple in late February. More importantly, Carta has committed to adding 464 jobs in Utah by 2022.

What is Carta?

Carta’s goal is to create more owners. We enable the thousands of private companies using Carta to issue, value, and transfer securities while mitigating the risks of error associated with tracking, compliance, and accounting. At the end of 2017, we introduced a similar all-in-one platform for public companies that provides equity administration and transfer agent services. Additionally, Carta for Investors allows VC firms to monitor portfolios and manage their limited partners in a centralized dashboard.

All told, Carta’s products and services are a significant improvement in breadth and capability from the days when we focused on digitizing paper stock certificates. Since Henry Ward and Manu Kumar founded the company in 2012, we’ve raised almost $70 million in venture funding. We have over 350 employees in Palo Alto, San Francisco, Seattle, New York City, and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Last September, we purchased Silicon Valley Bank’s analytics business, and we are now the country’s leading 409A valuations provider.

Carta is a FINRA broker-dealer and serves as a qualified custodian for RIAs. We are also an SEC-registered transfer agent, and our software can help companies run structured liquidity programs, and assists clients in staying compliant with the SEC and IRS.

There isn’t a better product on the market for companies and investors to create a single-source of truth for their cap tables and manage their equity ownership.

Carta and Silicon Slopes

We already have 50 employees in our new space on South West Temple. Typical of a fast-growing startup, there are plenty desks to fill. As we continue to develop the underlying mesh that connects the 500,000+ employees, investors, and founders of the Carta network, we’re looking forward to Utah’s impact on our growing company.

We’re also looking forward to becoming a valuable contributor to the Silicon Slopes community and Utah-based businesses. We attended Silicon Slopes Tech Summit 2018 in January — this was the first step in deepening the relationships with our fellow VC-backed companies in the Beehive State. Up next is creating as many owners as possible here.

You can learn more about Carta’s culture and see open positions at carta.com/about.

Nothing contained in this post constitutes tax, legal, insurance or investment advice, nor does it constitute a solicitation or an offer to buy or sell any security or other financial instrument.

Carta Securities LLC, Member FINRA and SIPC.