Launched Carta’s First Product for the Private Equity Market
I led the design for Carta's strategic expansion into the private equity market. In 1.5 quarters, I designed and launched a 0-1 financial modeling tool that helped PE firms understand their equity value bringing in $2M in annual recurring revenue.
Business Opportunity
Scenario modeling was identified as Carta’s key to unlocking the PE market
Carta dominated the startup and venture capital market for equity management, but needed to diversify its revenue streams. The Private Equity (PE) market represented an untapped opportunity worth millions in potential revenue.
Private equity firms rely on scenario modeling, a financial analysis technique integral to how PE firms make investment decisions.
Research Insights
An inefficient Excel-based process created communication bottlenecks
The process involved extensive back-and-forth communications to gather the right documents and inputs needed for scenario modeling. Team members used unstandardized Excel spreadsheets, shared exclusively through email. Communication was done primarily to exchange files rather than discuss insights to enable decision-making.
Exploration and Vision-setting
Bridging knowledge gaps: Reimagining Carta's private equity future through prototype-driven insights
Centralized collaboration
PE firms members can access all their portfolio company related scenario models in one location with modern day collaboration features like model ownership, status tracking, and highlighting priority items.
Tailoring model creation to end goals
By asking users about their modeling goal upfront, I created workflows that only show relevant inputs and assumptions reducing cognitive load in an already complex process.
Visual logic trails: Making calculation chains visible and understandable
Deal team associates need to be able to check and verify why proceeds look the way they do. My idea was that just like in Excel, users could look up the “formula” or the calculation. The formula in this case give users information about which conditions were triggered based on the inputs provided.
Solution
Strategic scope reduction to overcome adoption hesitancy
We stripped away all the "extras" and focused on creating the simplest version of the modeling tool that still delivered value — a true MVP. Deal Associates could run a single model for an investment company to see how the proceeds are distributed.
This approach provided PE firms with immediate value, giving deal associates a working product to test out their models on their own time.
Explain the Math
Distribution rules outlined in a company’s operation agreement dictate how profits are distributed amongst shareholders. Carta created a proprietary software language that could encode these rules.
PE associates wanted to be able to reference the rule-based logic we were using to calculate the distributions. Showing the code wasn’t an option — it requires technical understanding. Showing the legal text wasn’t an option either — it tends to be very complex and long.
I created a writing guide that mapped this proprietary code to easier to understand language. This guide ensured that we conveyed how the waterfall calculations were being performed without abstracting or distorting the original company rules.
From overview to detail: Designing clarity into complex distribution data
I designed a structured data visualization system to help deal associates make sense of two key aspects of proceeds distribution: shareholder payouts and how the payout thresholds worked. With so much data to absorb, it was crucial to present it in a way that felt intuitive—starting with a high-level view and making it easy to drill down into details when needed.
Results
A $2M ARR with our MVP launch
We also redirected our strategy towards integrating scenario modeling within existing features. And continued research in a broader PE-focused product strategy.