Separate of what did or didn’t happen here, I hope more companies crack the secondary market puzzle. The current environment really sucks for startup employee liquidity and might be going on for a lot longer.
This feels like the wrong solution. I mean, the reason we need a secondary market is because companies are going public much later than the used to. Why? Because the government made it a lot more onerous to go public. Why? Because companies were abusing the process to enrich insiders.
If we make the secondary market easier, we'll just be right back where we were, and then the government would probably just step in and make it onerous again.
I think the actual solution here is to make going public easier again while addressing the loopholes for abuse so that companies can go public sooner and everyone can get liquidity sooner.
Another example of where the honest people get penalized with a heavy process in the name of zero fraud.
What’s an alternative to Carta’s solution?
This knowledge might be outdated, I quit that game and opted to join public companies since a couple years ago.
Yes it’s an upfront risk that employees take when joining but man does it not also feel incredibly one sided and smelly, esp the later stage the startup gets