Practice Quarterly Transactions Before IPO
Alessandro Chesser, former VP of Sales at Carta, on the dynamics of CartaX auctions and preparing for liquidity
Quarterly private market transactions are really a rehearsal for becoming a public company. They force a late stage company to do the hard parts of public readiness while it still controls the pace, the buyer list, and the disclosures. Each auction gives management a live market check on what investors will actually pay, while training the finance team to package metrics, run investor communication, and build confidence around an eventual IPO or direct listing.
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The practical reason to start quarterly is that most companies already prepare board materials every quarter. CartaX was designed so those same materials can be repurposed into a data room, then buyers and sellers submit orders and the trade clears at one price, which turns a heavy one off process into a repeatable operating rhythm.
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This cadence changes employee behavior. In a tender that happens every 12 to 18 months, sellers feel like they have one shot and often anchor to aggressive prices. With recurring windows, employees can sell smaller amounts over time, which makes the market less lumpy and gives management cleaner price signals.
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The closest public market analog is Spotify before its 2018 direct listing. It ran quarterly liquidity events, made regular shareholder disclosures, and built enough pricing history that secondary trades helped support its eventual reference price. That is the model behind using recurring auctions as IPO prep instead of just an employee benefit.
The likely next step is a gradient from quarterly to monthly windows for the strongest late stage companies. As private firms stay private longer, the winners will look less like companies waiting for one big exit and more like businesses that gradually build public market habits, price history, and investor trust before the listing day arrives.