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Carta is an ERP for Private Equity, Private Credit, and Venture Capital. Carta is…
Articles by Henry
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Why we partnered with Morgan Stanley Wealth Management
Why we partnered with Morgan Stanley Wealth Management
I have watched this pattern play out for decades. A company raises a Series A.
7 Comments -
2026 CEO Letter
2026 CEO Letter
Below is a letter I sent to our customers on January 15, 2026 about where we're heading this year. Thank you for being…
14 Comments -
With AI, CEOs have to become CTOs
With AI, CEOs have to become CTOs
Over the last six months, I’ve been focusing more of my time on R&D. I’m back to my product and engineering roots.
10 Comments -
Clockspeed
Clockspeed
This is an excerpt from a post I wrote to Carta employees. I’d like to make the case that we should have a culture of…
12 Comments -
How to have meetings with Henry
How to have meetings with Henry
This is a reprint of a note I shared recently with Carta employees about how to have great meetings with me. I’ve been…
6 Comments -
The Best in the World at What We Do
The Best in the World at What We Do
In 2023 I wrote the post below but I never published it. I recently came across it while writing and shared it with…
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I thought Carta would be NYSE for Private Markets. I think we built Netsuite instead.
I thought Carta would be NYSE for Private Markets. I think we built Netsuite instead.
Many have asked me what Carta looks like in a post CartaX world? The thesis for Carta had always been very simple: win…
38 Comments -
Brown M&Ms
Brown M&Ms
I re-discovered this post I wrote to employees 6 years ago about brown M&Ms and the importance of paying attention to…
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Building Brand: Functional Loyalty vs Emotional Loyalty
Building Brand: Functional Loyalty vs Emotional Loyalty
This is an excerpt from a post I wrote a couple of years ago to Carta employees about building a brand. I hope it is…
7 Comments -
How Carta Created the Category of Captable Management
How Carta Created the Category of Captable Management
In January 2014 we sold our first captable customer. That customer was Kyle Samani with his startup Pristine.
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Activity
28K followers
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Henry Ward shared thisThe AI question people should be asking isn't "will this take my job?" It's "what do I do when it does?" We were talking about this at our employee town hall a few weeks ago. Here’s a hypothetical I put out to the team. Say you automate 20 hours of your week away. You used to have 40 hours of work. Now you have 20. Do you get fired or promoted? It depends on what you do next. If you sit on those 20 hours, you get fired. If you find 20 hours of higher-impact work - because presumably you automated the least valuable stuff first - you get promoted. Most people won't tell their manager (let alone their CEO) they automated half their job away, which means they aren’t waiting for their manager or me to hand them the next thing. They go find it. That's always been true of high performers. AI just makes the gap more visible, faster. The people thriving right now aren't asking "how do I use AI to go faster." They're asking: “now that I have this capacity, what's actually worth doing with it?” That's the hard question. It requires judgment about what matters, not just execution on what's in front of you. AI handles the execution. Judgment is still yours.
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Henry Ward shared thisWe were reviewing tax delivery the other week and the team showed me this chart. I had to stop and look at it twice. 2,084 tax returns delivered by April 15th. Nearly 2x what we delivered in 2025. 5.8x what we delivered in 2024. This is what happens when you challenge your team to do something that seems impossible - get K-1s out by Valentine's Day, then before the holidays, then re-engineer how taxes get done entirely. They just keep delivering. Shout out to Chad Willbur, Shubhi Nigam, Aditya (Adi) Mantri and the entire fund tax team 🚀 🚀
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Henry Ward shared thisI've seen many founders and employees build real value and then fumble the financial decisions that determine whether that value actually becomes wealth. Not because they weren't smart, because nobody was helping them. I know firsthand what it's like to build a company from scratch and suddenly have something real on paper. As a founder, you assume once the company succeeds, the hard part is over. It's not. The financial complexity alone - taxes, timing, concentration risk - is hard to navigate. That's why Carta partnered with Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. The "stay private longer" trend isn't going away. We see the pipeline of mature private companies heading toward liquidity building in real-time. When that wave hits, the difference between getting lucky and building enduring wealth comes down to decisions made months, or even years, in advance.Why we partnered with Morgan Stanley Wealth ManagementWhy we partnered with Morgan Stanley Wealth Management
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Henry Ward shared thisWhen we set out to build an ERP for private capital, the missing piece was always a CRM. Relationship data and fund data are two sides of the same coin. Who you're talking to, what they've committed, how their portfolio is performing - that context should live together. It never has. We closed that gap when we acquired ListAlpha. Now Carta CRM is part of the ERP - deal flow, LP relationships, and fund performance in one place. Join me and Ihar Valodzin, Head of CRM, on Monday for a live product demo. https://lnkd.in/gD4MX53kFrom First Meeting to Final Close: The Power of a Connected CRMFrom First Meeting to Final Close: The Power of a Connected CRM
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Henry Ward shared thisFor 15 years, I’ve been fighting my back. Herniated discs, pinched nerves, leg pain, limited motion. I'd temporarily recover only to re-injure myself and start over. Most doctors told me to stretch more or sit less. Neither helped. What most people don't know is that herniated discs aren't isolated events. They're symptoms of discs that harden and brittle with age - Degenerative Disc Disease. Just like skin wrinkles and hair turns gray, everyone's discs degenerate over time. For some of us, they degenerate faster and chronic back and nerve pain becomes a way of adult life. In January I had Artificial Disc Replacement (ADR) Surgery. It was life changing. I am pain free, I can stand up straight, I don’t have leg pain or tingling. Three months later I am on the ice playing hockey with my son which was personal torture for many years. For people like me, who suffer from back pain, it is a miracle surgery. The taboo around back surgery is stuck in the 1980s, when fusions with rods and screws left people worse off. ADR is different. It's been common in Europe for 20 years — high success rates, quick recovery, low downside. The technology moved on. The reputation didn't. In the US, insurer incentives, hospital economics, and physician training have kept it from going mainstream. It should be mainstream. If you've been told to just live with back pain, there may be another option. After finally finding relief, I’m passionate about helping others who suffer. Feel free to message me if you have more questions.
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Henry Ward shared thisStartup employees can't put equity in their 401k. Only cash. I recently wrote about why that's broken. Last week I was in DC doing something about it. I met with senior policymakers to propose an exemption to ERISA rules: let startup employees contribute employer stock into their 401k in lieu of cash. It keeps cash in employees' pockets today. It puts long-term assets in long-term accounts where they're meant to be. The conversations were great, and I'm confident we can change the system for the better.
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Henry Ward posted thisRight now there's a trend of celebrating how many tokens engineers burn through. Tokenmaxxing is all the rage. I think it's measuring the wrong thing entirely. High token usage is a sign of bad AI implementation, not good AI. The best AI users use fewer tokens. They write precise prompts. They structure their queries. They're not throwing everything at the model hoping for the best. It's like measuring how many lines of code your engineers write. More does not equal better. More probably means something is wrong. What matters more is how employees are using AI. What are they building? Are they building skills and workflows that can be used across Carta, not just for themselves? Tokens are an input. Nobody should be optimizing for inputs.
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Henry Ward shared thisEvery GP knows the feeling. You're about to walk into a room with your most important LP, and the data you need is in three different places. Accounting has the ledger. IR has the CRM. Deal teams have KPIs and spreadsheets. With the Carta ERP, that's over. Visual Accounting maps the flow of value from underlying asset all the way to your LPs - NAV, commitments, distributions, updated live. The LP CRM pulls from that same data, so when you're managing a relationship, fund performance is already in context. Your IR team and your accounting team are finally working from the same source of truth. The LP CRM also surfaces high-priority prospects - mapping your team's existing connections so you always know who can make the introduction. All in one place, for the first time.
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Henry Ward reposted thisHenry Ward reposted thisThe Carta CRM MCP is now live in the OpenAI App store. We've been building toward this for a while — giving deal teams an IR professionals a way to interact with their CRM data directly through LLMs, without being locked into a UI. You can now work with Carta CRM in a fully programmatic way: query contacts, update deals, and surface insights through natural language. It's the same platform, but accessible however you want to use it. https://lnkd.in/esUCd6_d
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Henry Ward liked thisHenry Ward liked thisExpense allocation used to eat entire afternoons. We have an agent for that. LPA reviews. Calculating percentages by pulling commitments, invested capital, and LP counts across funds. Journal entries built line by line ... usually right when everyone's already underwater at quarter-end. Upload an invoice or forward one by email. Our agentic expense engine extracts the amounts, entities, and payment details, then cross-references your LPAs and fund structure to pre-fill the allocation automatically. Allocation rules apply in real time. The audit trail writes itself. You review and approve. You're not building anything from scratch anymore. Your team gets time back and real-time visibility into the firm's cash position. No more waiting on Jerry to enter the numbers or Elaine to spot-check them. What will you do with all that extra time?
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Henry Ward liked thisHenry Ward liked thisCarta is dominating private capital markets with $4.2T in assets. It started as a cap table tool in 2012. Startup equity was managed in spreadsheets and PDFs from lawyers. Carta digitized it. Then they expanded into 409A valuations, fund administration for 9,000+ VCs, then CRM (they acquired ListAlpha in March), then loan operations and LP analytics. Henry Ward calls it the ERP for Private Capital. Today: 50,000+ companies across 160+ countries. $500M ARR. $7.4B valuation from a Series G led by Silver Lake. They got distribution by embedding early. Law firms recommended Carta at incorporation. VCs preferred companies already on the platform. The other thing they do well: their team post regularly. Execs and regional leads publish Carta's proprietary data on LinkedIn as a key part of their distribution strategy. We looked at 1,000+ posts across Carta's team. Here's who's posting: > Henry Ward (CEO & Co-Founder, 27K): Founded Carta in 2012 as eShares. Posts about product vision, AI adoption, and the ERP for Private Capital thesis. > Peter Walker (Head of Insights, 168K): Carta's content franchise. Posts every day using proprietary data from 50,000+ companies. Key part of Carta's content strategy. > Jeff Perry (CRO, 15K): Scaled revenue from $20M to $500M ARR. Previously Docusign and 13 years at Oracle. > Charly Kevers (CFO, 9K): Grew Carta from Series C to Series G. Led the 401(k) launch with Morgan Stanley. > Bhavik Vashi (MD APAC+MEA, 8K): Runs expansion across Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, and the Middle East. Writes detailed market analyses on APAC private capital trends. > Nicole Baer (CMO, 7K): Oversees all marketing globally including Peter Walker's data team. Previously Logitech, Zendesk, and Aon. > Vrushali Paunikar (CPO, 6K): Built Carta's fund admin platform supporting $100B+ in AUA. Took the VC business from zero to $80M+ ARR. > Ihar Valodzin (Director of Product, 6K): Founded ListAlpha, sold it to Carta in March 2026. Now building CRM MCP servers and Claude plugins for PE/VC deal teams. > Edwin Chan, ACA (Regional Head Europe & UK, 5K): Runs Carta's London and European presence. Leads events with private capital CFOs and SuperReturn conferences. > Grant Gwynne (Regional Lead ANZ, 5K): Building Carta's brand in Australia through founder breakfasts and events with Archangel Ventures and KPMG. > Holli Heiles Pandol (Policy, 4K): Posts about private markets fintech policy. Testified at the SEC. What other companies are doing great B2B content right now?
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Henry Ward liked thisWith 20+ funds in our portfolio @ Koa Labs we were constantly plagued by delays in fund accounting/tax - the establishment had infinite excuses why they couldn't get taxes out on time - thanks to Carta we now have almost all our taxes wrapped up on time - the funds who are not on Carta are almost always late while the funds on Carta are often early in delivering tax info. Carta is the future for fund management IMHO Thanks to the entire Carta team and of course to Henry Ward
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Michael Fanfant
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Jason Pate
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CLSystems
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