Liquidity as a Recruiting Necessity
Charly Kevers, CFO at Carta, on progressive price discovery and investor relations
The strategic point is that private company liquidity stopped being a founder convenience and became a recruiting necessity. Carta was not treating secondaries as a side finance tool, it was treating them as a way to make startup equity feel real enough to compete with public company stock. In practice, that means giving employees a predictable path to sell some shares, instead of asking them to wait years with no clear date or price.
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The core pain is simple, public companies can offer stock that employees can turn into cash now, while late stage startups often offer stock that may be valuable but cannot pay for a house, taxes, or family expenses. That gap gets bigger as companies stay private for 10 plus years and start hiring against public market employers.
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Recurring liquidity changes behavior more than one off tenders do. When employees know there is another window next quarter, they do not need to treat one event like their only shot. That makes pricing more orderly, reduces pressure to oversell, and lets management use liquidity as a steady compensation lever rather than an emergency release valve.
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For Carta specifically, talent was only the first layer. More frequent trading also gives management a live market price for stock, which can help in M&A, debt with warrants, investor relations, and the longer march toward becoming public ready. The same mechanism that helps hiring also gives the CFO a more useful currency and cleaner price signal.
The direction of travel is toward private companies acting more like lightly traded public companies long before an IPO. The winners will be the ones that pair controlled liquidity with clear disclosure and regular cadence, so equity works as compensation, stock works as acquisition currency, and the company can stay private longer without losing trust from employees or investors.