Episode 48: Peter Walker of Carta on
Using Equity to Attract & Retain EmployeesÂ
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On this episode
Shiv interviews Peter Walker, Head of Insights at Carta.
In this episode, Peter and Shiv discuss how PE-backed companies can use equity to attract, compete for, and retain employees, as well as to grow companies and increase continuity. Plus, learn how Carta’s first-party data helps PE firms, management companies, and founders learn from industry trends and best practices, including the recent Ownership Trends in Private Equity: 2024 report. Â
The information contained in this podcast is not intended to constitute, and should not be construed as, investment advice.
Key Takeaways
- Peter shares Carta's approach and introduces the Ownership Trends in Private Equity report (2:30)
- The importance of ownership as a KPI for PE firms and management teams (8:28)
- Why companies need to be transparent with employees about specific events that can affect their stake (13:42)
- Why there's been a slowed growth in employee stakeholders since 2022 (17:00)
- Does the size of a company correlate to the equity shared with employees and should smaller companies issue more equity? (25:39)
- Alternative avenues and compensation models available to companies when equity might not be feasible (21:36)
Resources
Click to view transcript
Episode Transcript
Shiv: All right, Peter, welcome to the show. How's it going?
Peter: Shiv, thanks so much for having me, man. I'm doing great. How are you?
Shiv: Good, excited to have you on. So why don't we start a background with a background about yourself and Carta and I'm sure people are familiar, but just for the audience, help us understand what your mandate is and we'll go from there.
Peter: Absolutely. So I run the insights team at Carta, which is sort of dedicated to making better use of all of the data that we have access to. But the reason that we have access to all this wonderful data is because Carta began its life as an equity management platform. We have about 50,000 or so startups that use us to issue equity to their employees, their investors, advisors, et cetera. And then we've sort of leveled up on the fund side as well. So what we do for funds is a whole host of what traditionally may have been thought of as the back office fund administration. So things like viewing up to date performance, capital calls, distributions, investment help, et cetera, as well as a lot of help on the tax and audit side. And we've started kind of moving from just venture capital funds into providing those same set of services for private equity funds. So. With those three sort of checkpoints on the private markets, we get a ton of information about what's going on in the market more broadly. And then it's my job to share that information out to the public.
Shiv: Yeah, we're actually connected on LinkedIn and I see you post regularly on different insights from the data on.Â
Peter: I probably spent too much time there, yes, exactly.
Shiv: Yeah, I see. I see a lot of the data and it's actually good. It's different because it's one of the unique things about Carta and it's first party data almost that you only have access to. So it leads to a lot of unique content, which kind of brings me to this report that you've created on the ownership trends and private equity. And so talk a little little bit about that just to set it up and then we'll dive deeper into some of the components.
Peter: Yeah. So, you know, traditionally, I think people think of employee ownership specifically as a venture capital thing, and they would have been right up until fairly recently. But as you know, there's been this push from a lot of private equity firms, Blackstone and others, to grant equity to people that are not just management in these companies. So, you know, lower level employees and the broadening of employee ownership is now something that seems to be a wave within private equity, just as it was a wave within venture capital before. So this report digs into what we at Carta know about that wave. We help about, I think it's 2,700 or so private equity-backed companies, LLCs and corporations that come from six or 700 private equity firms. And many, many of them are getting more interested in issuing some sort of interest, some sort of ownership to those employees. So that's what the general gist of this report is about.
Shiv: Yeah, it's a topic I'm super passionate about personally. In fact, in our company, almost everybody has some sort of equity because just from top down, usually people think about management teams and securing them. But one of the most important aspects inside companies is having continuity and having that institutional knowledge stick around for a long period of time. So it's good to see that private equity and these larger funds are actually getting on board with that. Talk about some of the insights there. What are the main trends? And I want to start off with this growth in employee ownership. Like what is the increase or how much of an increase have you seen?
Peter: Yeah, so I mean, I think it's been quite significant. You know we see about in terms of the employees that have ownership from private equity companies that are managed through Carta as the issuance platform, it's grown about 172% since 2019. So that's a big growth. Some of that is, of course, more private equity firms and more portfolio companies within them joining Carta. But a lot of it is actually growth within those private equity firms who may have started with you know, we're going to issue equity to say management teams and then a couple key stakeholders. And then the next year they provided a little bit more interest to more and more employees. And now they've got a significant percentage of those employees that have some sort of interest, profit interest, capital interests, whatever it might be in the company. So I do think that, you know, when we reference things like, like Blackstone's involvement in this and a lot of the broad sometimes thought leadership and you don't really know if they mean what they're saying or if this is actually a wave that's happening. I think this data proves that yes, private equity employees are receiving much more equity ownership than they ever have in the past.
Shiv: Yeah, and what do you think is underlying that trend? What led to the shift or for private equity to start prioritizing this?
Peter: You know, I think in some ways it has to do with the sort of co-mingling of venture and private equity as venture has become more professionalized. You know, private equity owned companies are going to be competing with venture backed companies for the same talent. And if the venture backed company is offering both salary bonus and an ownership stake, it kind of becomes difficult, as you said, to keep your top performers in these private equity backed companies if there's not a similar way to incentivize them to the long-term success of the business. So I think that's probably one of the reasons. The other is that as, we saw this in venture, you know, 10 years ago, as ownership becomes more entrenched, it's sort of, you've got your early adopters and then there's this middle big wave of companies. And in private equity, works a little differently than it does in venture in that the private equity owner of the company can kind of, make a choice for an entire portfolio of companies as opposed to a single business one off. So when a private equity firm becomes interested in incentivizing employees with ownership, that can have major impacts because they own multiple companies instead of just working with one executive team.
Shiv: Yeah, totally. I see that as well. It's just there is such a battle for talent at all times and you have to figure out ways to keep people interested and give them that upside.
Peter: Yeah. What do you actually, I had a question back for you on that, which is when you talk to management teams at these private equity firms, how important do you think that ownership is to them? Like do they, is broadening ownership something that they have as a KPI or are they more still business focused?
Shiv: On the investor side, think they're more focused on actually growing the asset. But when they think about their key people on the teams, it definitely becomes one of the levers that they look to pull. they also allocate some portion of equity to be used for that, right? Because it's so important to retain the talent. And the other side of it that I personally think is super important is just about wealth creation. If you're going to have wealth be created at different levels inside of a business. Like having equity is the critical component there because salaries cap out, bonuses cap out. And so you want to have participation from everybody or as many people as possible on that upside event if it comes. And even just for me personally, when the way I was able to start this business is I was the CM of a software company before that and I had equity. then when we sold that, that gave me almost the runway I needed to start this company. So you kind of increase wealth amongst everybody that's working in a company by giving them that opportunity. So I think from a societal standpoint, it's a really positive source of influence.
Peter: Absolutely. I mean, it's sort of the, you know, the founding story here at Carta when Henry, our CEO, kind of came into this business, moving people from the salary to the equity stack because equity is unbounded if there's a successful exit. Whereas salary, you're just kind of working off of the same pool as everyone else. And it's really difficult to create wealth that way, even if you're being paid a really wonderful salary. And in this kind of moment within venture capital, which of course everyone is probably aware, hasn't been the greatest couple of years. think sometimes people lose sight of the value of equity and it takes those major IPOs or exit moments to remind everyone that a lot of the reason why Silicon Valley is the way it is, is because some of those early exits got recycled back into, like you said, new people starting new companies, hiring new people. It's a virtuous cycle that comes from this ownership.
Shiv: Yeah, totally. The reason the whole ecosystem works is because the equity actually has value at the end of it all. Another thing is just, I think connected to this idea is in a lot of cases, employees are rewarded, stock incentive units or options or whatever you want to call them, but it just looks like value on paper and then if you join a company, you get some stock options, but then you leave a couple of years in and you go to another company, you can actually miss out on wealth creation events. so sticking around and seeing something through to the point where that value is realized is important. So I think even on the employee side, it kind of changes how you look at opportunities. It's not just about, let's say jumping ship to another role where maybe you make 10, 15, 20,000 more dollars per year. You're actually looking on a longer horizon and almost like an investor but within an employee capacity.
Peter: Yeah, the alignment of interest there with ownership being the sort of crucial tipping point matters a ton when it comes to employee retention. And then as you mentioned, employees sort of willingness to stick through this company because they can kind of see on the horizon, Hey, there's going to be an exit event. And I really want to be a part of that. In fact, I think that in some ways, private equity employees can look around to a perhaps shorter horizon than many of these venture backed companies. Mean, you know, the stats on venture-backed companies IPO-ing, it's taking 10, 12, maybe even longer for many of these companies to IPO, whereas transactions in the PE world happen on a more regular basis. So in some ways, I think that the impact of ownership with private equity employees may even be more quickly realized than it is amongst many venture capital-backed ones.
Shiv: Yeah, for sure. And also just, you know, the whole period for these PE-back companies is on average, let's say five to seven years. But in a lot of cases, if you join a company in year three, they're going to be flipped in the next two to three years. And you're going to see a pretty, significant event, especially if there's like a change in control clause and all that stuff that goes along with it. The actually the other thing that I think is like a super important factor is the amount of transparency. Because I think historically, when equity was in fewer hands, the rest of the organization wouldn't really know when to expect certain rounds or exit events to happen. And I think some of the culture changes that's been happening is about getting more people into the loop on when transactions might occur so that people actually see that period through and don't jump ship or it becomes almost like a retention mechanism as well.
Peter: Yeah, I think that, you know, this is obviously speaking our own book here at Carta, because one of the things that this platform does is provide transparency to employees. But I think it also, there's sort of a hidden benefit towards increased transparency, which is there's not like two sets of facts where the management team may understand, Hey, there's a transaction coming up, or we have to prep for this specific event that is on the horizon. And the employee is sort of in the dark. When both sets of people are running in the same direction and can like see the events or the potential up ahead, you get a, think, meaningful boost in productivity and excitement. You know, I, my, I have a bunch of friends who've been part of IPOs and venture and other places. And there's really like some intangible momentum that is wonderful when you have this business that's going well and you can see, we're all working towards this amazing same goal. I think it only helps in terms of keeping those great employees around.
Shiv: Yeah, it's like in a lot of companies, even if you're issued options, it's a bit of a black box, right? You're like, you're like, okay, you get 100,000 units and it's like, what's the total pool? How much is this worth? Like what's my, like I'm buying in for this strike price, but what will we potentially, there's all these questions that are unanswered and you, you're not given that clarity, especially if you raise another round, like what does this mean for my shares? Like you just, you're just completely in the dark. So big fan of transparency and I think what goes along with that, and we preach this a lot to our clients and also just how we look at marketing or growth in general is you can only make good decisions when you have as much of the overall puzzle as possible, which includes your financials, which includes your looking at things like your balance sheet and knowing how much cash you have on hand or how much capital you need to raise or what your burn rate is and information like that. I think knowing the capital allocation and the cap table is one of those pieces of information that drastically can influence decision making. And if employees don't have access to that, then it's kind of harder to do their role as best as possible.
Peter: You know, this is something that we preach to our early stage venture founders all the time. I actually think that it costs you time and effort to make sure that your employees are well educated on the value of equity and the various sort of tactics that you need to take. What does the strike price mean? How does this affect my taxes, et cetera? But putting in that effort upfront is sort of an employee benefit that in the end, it doesn't cost you any actual dollars, but you have made all of your employees smarter for this job and their following jobs. And they're more likely to trust you as a founder when you've been transparent with them and said, look, our fundraising round is going to come in at this value. And this is what that means for your equity. If they can really grok that it, it goes a long way to proving, Hey, this is a person in the founder and a company that truly cares about me, my wellbeing, and my wealth creation. There's very little that's gonna be more incentivizing for great work than someone who clearly cares about the actual financial health of their employees.
Shiv: For sure, I think this is one of the most underrated parts of building a business is this employee-employer relationship and trying to support them as and even just getting them access to resources. Like there's one is which is teaching them about all this stuff, but also not every employee will have the resources to hire their own like attorney and go through all the paperwork and you know, figuring out a way to get them access to those kinds of resources or reimbursing them so that they can avail themselves of those kinds of resources. I think it's such a big step. I'm going to get through the report a little bit more. One of the things I noticed is that the growth in employee stakeholders has slowed a lot since 2022. So talk about that and why you think that's happening because even though overall it's trending up, but on a per year basis, fewer employees are being added. So help me understand that.
Peter: Yeah, I mean, in some ways, this is, think, a reflection of the macro environment. You know, if we were to take an example from the venture world, we see the same sort of thing where venture-backed companies have stopped hiring nearly as much as they were in the boom times of 2020 and 2021. So that reduction in hiring obviously has an impact on the number of employee growth stakeholders receiving equity. The second is just that equity is, as we spoke about before, it's much more opaque than your salary. Like employees are always going to negotiate on their salary or like have an expectation about what that should be. In many cases, the employee walks into some of those or the candidate, I should say, walks into some of those hiring conversations without any sort of expectation around what their equity will be or how much they should receive, et cetera. So it just kind of gets pushed into the background when times are a little bit tougher as they definitely have been for technology companies and startups over the last two years. That's, think, most of it. There's also, I think, some, if you just look at the companies that were on Carta before the shutdown, the slowdown happened, so companies, private equity-backed companies that had joined in 19, 20, 2021, et cetera, they were still issuing similar amounts of equity to new employees. But the ones that are joined later, maybe we're reducing again that employee or the group of employees who actually held equity to a slightly smaller base. So hopefully most of this is kind of elided by the macro changes and as venture and private equity gets back to a little bit more healthy, we're gonna see some of those lines pop.
Shiv: Yeah, the interesting thread on that is, you know, some of the things that we're talking about, I think, should be agnostic or not influenced by macro conditions, because no matter what, you know, having employees participate will improve retention and improve how involved they are or how much they care about a company. But usually when things slow down, you give on certain things that could be important but not urgent. And it kind of takes a backseat, which I think is something that should change is, because, especially when times are tough, you wanna retain your best folks as much as possible. It could also be potentially caused by the layoffs that have happened, right? Because a lot of tech companies have laid off people. So some of these might be related to that as well.
Peter: Yeah, that's a great point that I probably should have mentioned before. We see this in our broader employment data across the, you know, call it 50,000 or so startups on the platform. It's this, to put it in sort of stark terms in 2022, companies on Carta hired something like half a million employees. In 2023. That number was more like 260,000. cut in half. and actually for the first year, that we have great data for. going back to call it, I don't know, 2014, 2015 or so. 2023 was the first time where we saw that employee leaves actually outpaced new hiring. Not by very much, it was a pretty close run thing, but, Â that employee leaves both departures by choice and then also departures through layoff, which was unfortunately a much bigger segment of it than it usually is. That was higher than new hires. So that was like, that's the landscape that a lot of these founders are walking into where they're saying, look, in the prior years, was grow as fast as possible and throw a head count at problems. And now the mandate from investors and others is grow reasonably fast, but be capital efficient. And that balancing those two distinct KPIs, I think, has thrown a wrench in some of these hiring mechanics.
Shiv: Yeah, I think a counterpoint on this, and we work with a ton of these private equity groups and we're asked to analyze marketing organizations and how efficient they are, what the right size marketing team structure would be like. And it's actually unreal how much waste there is inside companies. And so I think that's like the counterfactual of that is you want to make sure key people and people that are essential to growing a company or contributing in a way that is hard to replace. You want to make sure that they have equity at the same time in like a economic cycle, like the run-up that we had in the 2010s where everything is growing, you end up having organizations that are too bloated and have a lot of extra headcount that maybe not, may not be adding as much value. And then as the market shifts, you start to question the need for every role. Do we need this role? Do we need five of the same role or do we need two of those folks in those roles? And slowly then you start evaluating the value of each person and each seat. And you may not want to issue as much equity to folks that are not adding as much value. So I think that's the flip side where you actually want to make sure that you have the right amount of people for what you're trying to do in your size of organization.
Peter: Yeah, it's definitely the case that, you know, executive teams and founders in particular are scrutinizing all of those new hires, as you mentioned before, and people that are currently at the company to say, you know, in this new world where interest rates are high and growth is harder to come by, which of these roles is actually mission critical, in a way that perhaps, you know, more headcount made sense in the earlier world and less makes sense now. think just to put a figure on it. For series A companies in the venture world, we saw the median series A company had about 23 or so full-time equity holding employees for the companies that raised their series A in 2022. This year in 2024, the median series A raise, the company has about 15 full-time employees. So that's a major shift. I mean, 23 to 15 is a massive drop and it means that people are growing faster with fewer headcounts and with all the advent of AI tooling and et cetera, I don't really see that decline slowing down anytime soon. I think that these companies can achieve these milestones with fewer and fewer full-time employees.
Shiv: Yeah, it's interesting. think from an employee standpoint, the opportunity is that depending on where you are in your career, there is a wealth creation, excuse me, event or opportunity in front of them if they can prove to be pivotal to an organization's growth and be able to negotiate that with an employer that sees that value and basically become like a 10X contributor in whatever their function is, whether it's coding or marketing or sales or what have you. And so I think the employees need to actually look at it from that lens to actually capture that value. from the employer's standpoint, it's sifting through who is that 10X contributor versus just a regular contributor on their team and making sure that they're compensated and retained and actually growing inside their companies.
Peter: Yeah, absolutely. And it's a tough pill to swallow for many employees. And as you mentioned, there's been a ton of layoffs and like all of that employment change can feel really awful if you're impacted by one of those events. But it also is in a moment to look at where you're like your zone of geniuses and say, like, how can I become that 10X contributor to the next company that I'm going to work with? Because I know when I'm hired next, that's going to be because they absolutely need me in a way that perhaps in 2021 it was more, hey, we'd like to keep expanding the team and we have some really cool, interesting candidates.
Shiv: Right, totally. And like, it's funny because historically, you know, companies like Microsoft and Amazon, if you go to Seattle, there's like thousands of people that are millionaires because they work to Microsoft and they have that kind of an opportunity. Those kinds of opportunities are in front of employees now inside these PE backed companies or VC backed companies. Do you see employee ownership being higher? And I see there's a chart on this, but just talk through that. Are larger companies giving more equity to their employees than smaller ones?
Peter: Yes, so that's definitely a finding from the report. As the companies grow, employees, as you would naturally expect, represent a larger share of total stakeholders in the company. have PE-backed companies of all shapes and sizes on Carta, but I think the majority of them have actually issued at least 10 different employees' interests of some type. And what we also see is that once a company issues one employee some interest types, It's actually very rare that that holds. That one is sort of the gateway to five or 10. And then as they grow, employee interests sort of represent a large share of stakeholders across the company. it does seem, we see very few PE backed companies that issue two or three employees’ ownership and then just sort of stop. It seems to just kind of continually rise as that PE firm, excuse me, as that PE backed company grows. And then if there is a transaction event, there may be a little bit of a gap in that growth given the interests of the new owner. But a lot of times that new owner will actually take on the employee ownership from the prior ones and expand it.
Shiv: Right? When you say represent majority of the stakeholders, you're not referring to percentage of the company, you're just referring to number of people.
Peter: Correct, yeah, number of people holding interest. If you look at it on a percentage of the company base, clearly, know, management teams and investors are still gonna hold a much larger value of the actual respective companies, but employees will make up a larger portion of the general population that holds equity at all.
Shiv: Right. Yeah. Do you think the smaller companies should consider issuing more equity to employees? Cause inside like, say sub 100 or even sub 50 or sub 25 type of employee groups. I feel like fewer founders, especially don't always take on that headache initially in the early days. Cause you have to set up the paperwork and the infrastructure and have those conversations and value the company. It just feels too early sometimes to take on that work. But do you think they would be better served to start thinking about these things at an earlier stage?
Peter: I do I think that, you know, the difference here between venture and PE is maybe more significant at the earliest part of the companies. With venture backed, given the way that the fundraising cycles work, a lot of that idea around how do we establish the company value? What do we go through in terms of paperwork to issue employee equity? That's kind of sort of baked in. You know, there are very few US-based startups now that are going to try to attract venture capital. that don't grant their employees some sort of equity. It's actually become the, it's very rare to do that, right? The norm is to grant equity. And I think that we'll see a similar transition with PE. They take a while for sure. And there is, I don't want to negate some of the administrative headaches that might fall on founders at the earliest stages. Carta can help with that, but there's also kind of this cultural sense, right? But the choice between granting only management, some sort of interest and then granting employees interests. Well, once you do that, you're kind of moving along the path towards granting everyone interest. Now that may take a long, long time, you know, you incentivizing these top performers, like as that becomes more of the default cultural norm amongst private equity backed companies, I don't see how those conversations don't lead towards more and more employees holding interests over time.
Shiv: Totally. Yeah. I was also thinking about bootstrap companies because I'm thinking about our ourselves. Like we don't, we don't have any investor I found at the company. And in the early days, it was just one of those projects that was sitting on the side. And I only really took it on about three years into the company where I had some bandwidth and properly could value the company or think about the right structure. But even then it took some work and I don't want to turn this into a commercial for Carta, but I looked in the card at the time and you guys didn't support Canadian companies. So then I had to kind of go do a workaround with lawyers and try to find a different way to kind of house all the minutes and all the minute book and all the stuff that goes along with setting up all this stuff. And it is a bit of work and it distracts from core business operations and all of that. So I can totally see how in the earlier stages, the founders that are just trying to find product market fit or drive sales and just even attract talent at a basic level, you don't have time for a project like that.
Peter: Yeah. So one, apologies if we didn't support Canadian companies at that point. We do now. So if there's Canadian companies listening, don't let that hold you back. The second point, which I want to double down on what you made is like, this is not a effort-free or cost-free exercise for founders. It definitely costs time, effort, maybe some lawyers, et cetera, to set this kind of stuff up. For bootstrap founders in particular, it is some of these differences between company types become very salient. So if you have an LLC and you're bootstrapping that LLC, it may actually not be right for you to grant ownership options or, you know, ISOs for instance, in the way that a venture back company would, but there's a lot of other ways to incentivize employees to the upside of ownership. So those could be profit interest units, capital interest units, so many different types and ways to grant some sort of a feeling of ownership in these companies.
Shiv: Talk about those options, like what are the different available avenues to issue something to employees?
Peter: Yeah, so there's, mean, there's quite a lot. There's, so on the core venture back side, you've got the standard ISO, which probably most, venture backed employees are familiar with. That's an incentive stock option, which means they are granted equity, that has two sort of, gating criteria to it. There's a vesting schedule and then there's the exercise moment. So you got to wait, you got to stay at that company for a given number of years in order to receive, to vest that equity. And then you have to choose to actually exercise it. So options are different from stock because options require that the employee actively pay an exercise cost to take full ownership of those options. That's the standard route and venture. In private equity backed companies, there's a whole host of different sort of interests that can come into play. So there's profit interest units, which is of course you share in any eventual profits of the business. There's capital interest units which represent true equity ownership within this LLC or this company. And then there's a whole long tail of custom warrants, options, phantom shares. The names get pretty interesting and confusing. But in general, think that private equity backed employees are much more likely to be sharing in profits than the venture backed employees. We've seen a little bit of that in venture. But most of the time, venture its outright ownership in the business that only becomes real when some sort of exit event happens. In private equity, it can actually be a lot more common to issue profit interest units, which may allow for some sort of compensation earlier than only on an exit event.
Shiv: What's the difference between profit sharing and just for the audience, what's the difference between profit sharing and a profit interest unit?
Peter: So profit sharing would be, if you imagine this is a bootstrap business, you come to the end of the year and you say, hey, we made a million dollars in profit. What are our choices to do with that profit? We can reinvest it back into the business, or we can pay out to various owners of the business. We can either pay it out to the founder or pay it out to a group of people, like employees, whoever actually has profit sharing as a part of their compensation agreement. Profit interest units is much more like an equity-esque form of compensation. So they have a liquidation threshold that's assigned to those profit units. So the LLC has to achieve profits above a certain limit for the interest to participate in the exit. And then the value of those profit interests is much more tied to the growth of the underlying business. So it's a little bit different. There's also capital interest units which function effectively like stock, those are generally granted towards investors on the PE side, as opposed to employees who, employees get a lot of different interest types, but profit interests are the most common.
Shiv: And as founders, investors, and people that are listening and thinking about all these different options, which types of compensation models are better for, let's say, management teams versus employees? And how should they kind of think about that?
Peter: Yeah, I mean, there's definitely no one right way to think about interests in the business. When we look across the interest types, employees are about half of the employee interest issued on Carta are profit interest units. When you get to management and investors, management, it's about an equal split between profit and capital interests. And then investors almost, you know, not exclusively, but a high, high percentage of those would be capital interest units. So that seems to be how most private equity firms are thinking about this. In terms of the way that they incentivize different people, this is actually a great opportunity for people to go and look through our LLC equity type guide because there's so many different considerations that you and your team might have between what's best for our employees, what's best for their tax treatments in particular, which can get a little complex. So I don't want to speak out of turn and say there's only one right way to do it.
Shiv: Right, right, right, right. Yeah, and I think taxation is just one of those considerations that is often overlooked, right? Even when you're granting options, if something happens too soon after you've granted them, like it exposes the employee to things in ways that they may not even be aware of when they're agreeing to things like that. So what's a good resource, and maybe it's on Carter, but what's a good way for them to learn about all of these different options available to themselves and all the other factors involved?
Peter: Yeah, I mean, if you go to carta .com slash learn, there's a ton of stuff there. If you're a private equity employee, you're going to need to sift through a little bit of the venture capital stuff to get to the private equity interests. But there's a ton of information from our team around the different kinds of interest units you might want to issue, how they play in both the tax and the employee, like financial planning worlds. There's a lot of stuff to get into there. And some of that probably is the clutch that holds some founders back from issuing interest or equity at all. So our goal is to try to make that as one as illuminated as possible and kind of reduce some of that murkiness down.
Shiv: That's awesome. And if people want to learn more or read the ownership trends report that we're talking about on this episode, where would they go to get access to it?
Peter: Yep. It's carta .com. This ownership report actually, had you granted a little bit of a sneak peek. It actually comes out next week. So on Tuesday, what is that? September, I can't do math, 10th, something like that? Yeah, 10th. So Tuesday, September 10th, this ownership trends and private equity report comes out. And then if any of that sparks interest for you, there's a ton of links in the report back to carta .com where you can.
Shiv: Awesome, yeah, by the time this episode is live, the report will be live. So we'll be sure to share the links to that and any of the other resources that you mentioned. And with that said, Peter, thanks for coming on and sharing all your insights. It's something that I think is super important to companies, founders and employees everywhere. And I think it's gonna do a lot of good. So appreciate you coming on and sharing your insight.
Peter: Yeah, my pleasure, man. Thanks for having me.
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