Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday (Thursday, this week) show where we niche down to a single topic and dig deep.

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This week Alex brought on Carta CEO Henry Ward to chat through the early-stage market with us. We had a grip of data and a sheaf of questions, which were augmented at the last minute with a data dump from Carta itself.

Here’s what we got into:

• The current state of the early-stage venture capital market: From Ward’s perspective, the early-stage market is in better shape than many folks think; it’s the later-stages of venture capital that are torpid. We also riffed on the quality of startups that are raising today, and how much pain is coming for young tech companies that can’t quite attract more capital.
• Carta’s new seed and Series A product: Carta recently announced a mostly-automated method for closing early-stage rounds, so we wanted to better understand the economics of the effort — and why it’s more expensive to raise today than it was a few years back — and what the unicorn hopes to achieve from the work.
• We ended with a look ahead, and a series of fun closing questions with Ward.

That’s just the high-level summary. We also discussed entrepreneurship more broadly, the importance of LLCs, and even how to construct a podcast interview. It was good fun!

We are back Friday with our news roundup. Talk soon!

Charting the future of the early-stage venture market with Carta’s CEO by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/08/charting-the-future-of-the-early-stage-venture-market-with-cartas-ceo/