Training Wheels for Public Companies

The deeper point is that Carta is framing private liquidity as training wheels for public company life, not a substitute for it. Regular secondary auctions let a late stage company practice the hard parts gradually. It starts sharing more operating data, builds relationships with crossover funds, and gets repeated market based prices for its stock before an IPO forces all of that change at once.

• In practice, this means a CFO gets a middle step between a closed private company and a fully public one. Instead of one tender every 12 to 18 months tied to the last round price, the company can run recurring events, update investors on a cadence, and learn what disclosures serious buyers actually need.
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• That matters because tender offers often misprice growth. Across 64 tender offers totaling more than $3B, 83% were priced at or below the last round, and participation averaged 37%. A recurring market is meant to produce fresher prices, reduce one shot selling pressure, and make liquidity feel less binary for employees and early investors.
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• The closest analogue is Spotify before its direct listing. It let shares trade in regular private liquidity events, held shareholder calls, and built a pricing history before listing. The idea is to arrive in public markets already behaving more like a reporting company, with investors and management used to the rhythm.
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This points toward more companies operating in a hybrid state for years before an IPO. The winners will be the ones that can add just enough disclosure, governance, and price discovery to attract long term investors, while still keeping issuer control over who gets onto the cap table and when.