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What are investors' feedback on the CartaX pitch, what resonates with them, and what are the points of pushback?

James McGillicuddy

Co-founder & CEO at BRM

Sure. So the CartaX pitch is kind of different for every investor from the sense of, are they net new investors? Are they previous existing investors in the business? Are they early stage? Are they late stage?  Where do they play in the ecosystem? Are they a secondary fund, for example?

Lind of the overwhelming pitch for all of them is that this is fair, efficient price discovery. And you actually want that as an investor. You want to be able to make sure that the business that you're working with or want to work with is coming in at a fair price.  If you're an early stage investor, you want to make sure that there's not some secondary individual or new firm jamming a new price on your CEO, and if you're a pre-IPO investor, you want to make sure that you're not overpaying for a given deal. So that's a big thing that's resonate with everyone is, hey, this is fair and efficient price discovery. 

The second thing that's resonating is the level of increased corporate governance. To the extent, the people know that a lot of these companies and the CEOs themselves love this aspect, that they just don't have to go from a non-reporting company to public reporting company overnight with analysts and everyone breathing down their throat.

So what kind of has resonated for everyone is like, hey, let's get on the glide path to go public. Let's start acting like we're a reporting company, and from there, the merits are kind of quite large, because then you're also getting to know the public market investors. You're starting to know the folks that are going to be putting not just 50, a hundred million dollars to work in your business as a private company, with two, three, four, 500 million plus over the course of your time as a public company.

Find this answer in James McGillicuddy, head of strategy at Carta, on building an issuer-centric platform and investing in secondaries
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