Carta: Laid Off 16% of Staff in April 2020

Category: startup equity infrastructure
Pandemic-layoff role: Additional sourced company
Last updated: 2026-09-29

Pandemic-role map

Reader shorthand: cap-table software company that laid off 161 people on April 15, 2020, eight days after the first sale in a new equity round that raised about $210 million.
What Carta did for customers: kept private companies' shareholder records (cap tables), ran 409A valuations and administered venture funds.
What changed in the pandemic: it modeled slower growth in 2020 because it expected fewer startups to buy its software.
Relief role: not a lender or relief intermediary; no Carta or eShares borrower appears in SBA's PPP loan data.

Before the pandemic

Carta began as eShares, the name on its 2020 and 2021 SEC filings, which give its address as 333 Bush Street in San Francisco. Henry Ward, who writes that "we started eShares" as a "Nasdaq for Private Markets," is its chief executive. It was a private, venture-backed company; Marc Andreessen sat on its board. It is also registered with the SEC as a transfer agent, the record-keeper for a company's shareholders.

What the pandemic changed

On April 15, 2020, Ward told an all-hands meeting that Carta would lay off 161 employees, 16% of the company, and then published the script. He described two views of a layoff, the shareholder's and the employee's, and said: "I chose to manage my conflict by taking the shareholder perspective in deciding who (and how many) should leave and taking the employee perspective on how to help those who leave." Carta had first cut spending on software, cloud hosting, travel and real estate after it "modeled a slower growth rate in 2020," then turned to headcount; he wrote that the cuts were not uniform across teams.

Every departing employee got three months of pay regardless of tenure, and COBRA health premiums paid through the end of 2020. For anyone with less than a year at the company, the one-year vesting cliff was removed and the window to exercise options extended to a year.

The money

The layoff came in the middle of a fundraise. eShares' Form D, signed May 15, 2020, reports an equity offering of $180 million with a first sale on April 7, eight days before the layoff. By the filing, $175.0 million had been sold to 34 investors. An amended Form D filed in June raised the figures to $210.0 million, all of it sold, from 39 investors. The filings give no revenue figure; the revenue box reads "Decline to Disclose."

After the first shock

Carta raised again in 2021: a Form D filed that August reports $498.5 million sold of a $500 million offering, with a first sale on July 30, 2021.

In January 2024 Ward wrote that Carta would leave the secondary-trading business. Holding customers' cap-table data, he wrote, was a reason it could not use that data: "Just the appearance of impropriety is damning." His post gives rough annual revenue by line: cap tables about $250 million, fund administration about $100 million, private equity about $20 million and secondary trading about $3 million. He called the liquidity business "my greatest failure and disappointment," and wrote: "we will exit the secondary trading business to eliminate any concern that we are not acting in our founders' best interests."

Where the company is now

Carta is a private company. Its transfer-agent report for 2025 lists 2,357,976 individual securityholder accounts on its books at December 31, 2025, across 21,645 equity issues and 408 debt issues, and 22,053 items received for transfer during the year.

Carta Profile: Pandemic Layoffs, Business Model, and Current Status