Manufacturing Trust Through Marquee Issuers
Alessandro Chesser, former VP of Sales at Carta, on the dynamics of CartaX auctions and preparing for liquidity
CartaX was designed to manufacture trust before it tried to manufacture liquidity. The first auctions had to feature companies with enough brand recognition and investor demand to clear cleanly, because one bad early trade would make CFOs even more wary of recurring secondaries. In practice that meant chasing late stage names that could attract crossover funds, support larger blocks, and tolerate the disclosure and governance work that recurring auctions require.
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This was an issuer acquisition strategy as much as an investor one. Carta positioned auctions as a bridge between one off tenders and an IPO, so the best proof point was a company already big enough to need employee liquidity, cap table refresh, and pre IPO price discovery, usually Series C and later rather than young Series A startups.
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Large names also solved the market design problem. Institutional buyers on CartaX were mainly crossover funds, growth funds, and large asset managers looking at companies near $1B or more in enterprise value. Those investors care about recognizable issuers, meaningful block sizes, and enough disclosures to underwrite the company like a future public stock.
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The closest precedent was Nasdaq Private Market, which built issuer controlled liquidity programs around late stage companies and processed $4.8B across 87 secondary programs in 2019. Carta was aiming at the same late stage wedge, but with the added advantage of owning the cap table system of record and transfer workflow.
If recurring private liquidity keeps spreading, the winning platforms will start with marquee issuers, then move down market as the process becomes more standardized. The flashy names are the beachhead. Once they prove that auctions can price stock, retain employees, and prepare companies for public markets, smaller companies can copy the playbook much earlier in their life cycle.