Liquidity as a recruiting requirement
Charly Kevers, CFO at Carta, on progressive price discovery and investor relations
Liquidity becomes a recruiting requirement once a startup is hiring against companies whose equity already behaves like cash. At that point, candidates stop valuing startup stock as a distant lottery ticket and start comparing what they can actually sell, when they can sell it, and how predictable that process is. That is why this tends to show up around Series C and beyond, when companies are mature enough to be competing for senior engineers and operators coming from public companies or late stage privates with regular tender programs.
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The practical issue is compensation parity. Public tech companies can pay less cash than it appears because employees can sell stock continuously. A late stage private has to recreate some of that value with periodic liquidity, otherwise its equity gets mentally discounted toward zero in recruiting conversations.
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Tender offers were the default bridge because they let the company control who sells, who buys, and at what price, usually using a recent primary round as the anchor. But they are heavy lifts, with legal work, tax complexity, and long gaps between events, which is why more regular programs became attractive.
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Carta was built to serve this exact transition. Its cap table system of record, tender offer workflows, transfer agent role, and tax history all reduce the manual work of moving private shares. That infrastructure advantage is why liquidity sits so close to the core product, even when brokering itself creates trust conflicts.
The next step is that late stage private companies will treat liquidity more like a standing compensation feature and less like a rare special event. The winners will be the companies that can offer employees a clear cadence, controlled disclosures, and credible price history, enough liquidity to compete with public market employers without giving up the control that kept them private in the first place.