CARTA AND SALT LAKE CITY: WHY?

• Author: Wu, Mike
• Position: SILICON SLOPES

Silicon Valley is a great place to start a tech company. But it can be a difficult place to scale one, especially when the mission of a company is to create seven billion owners, map the global ownership network and unlock private market liquidity. With such ambitious goals, Carta needed to add more locations to attract talent, scale quickly and keep costs low.

With this in mind, Carta expanded operations to Salt Lake City at the end of 2017. Utah is a business-friendly state, and Salt Lake is full of young and talented financial professionals graduating from schools like Brigham Young University and the University of Utah. Utah-based companies raised $623 million from private investors in 2016 and $627 million in the first three quarters of 2017 The growth in private market funding and Utah's industrial banking infrastructure positioned Salt Lake as an optimal place to scale Carta's operations. The proximity to Park City, Snowbird and Alta didn't hurt, and neither did the short 90-minute flight to San Francisco.

The business and logistical arguments were too compelling. Salt Lake City was the clear choice for Carta's largest planned office.

We moved into our new space across from the Salt Palace on the seventh floor of 175 S. West Temple in late February. More importantly, Carta has committed to adding 464 jobs in Utah by 2022.

WHAT IS CARTA?

Carta's goal is to create more owners. We enable the thousands of private companies using Carta to issue, value and transfer securities while mitigating the risks of error associated with tracking, compliance and accounting. At the end of 2017, we introduced a similar all-in-one platform for public companies that provides equity administration and transfer agent services. Additionally, Carta for Investors allows VC firms to monitor portfolios and manage their limited partners in a centralized dashboard.

All told, Carta's products and services are a significant improvement in breadth and capability from the days when we focused on digitizing paper stock certificates. Since Henry Ward and Manu Kumar founded the company in 2012, we've raised almost $70 million in venture funding...