Our portfolio company eShares changed their name to Carta this week.
Why?
For a bunch of reasons, but mainly because the opportunity has gotten a lot bigger than “shares”.
As founder/CEO Henry Ward points out in this post, the opportunity is to build the ownership graph:
If you drill far enough into the ownership graph, through the pensions and real-estate trusts and all the shared ownership vehicles, you eventually get to a person. You reach their retirement plan or savings account or option grant or even a simple title representing their ownership interest. That is how our society works. The leaf nodes of the ownership graph must be individual people.
This ownership graph is large and hard to quantify. We don’t know how many corporations, properties, investment vehicles, and partnerships exist in the world. But we do know if you mapped the entire graph your leaf nodes would eventually represent every person in the world. There are 7 billion people in the world. That is a lot of leaf nodes. Who knew the cap table market could be so big?
If you and/or your company uses eShares (now Carta) to track your ownership table, you likely understand this. Using Carta is transformative for all parties. And that is why it is growing as fast right now as any software company I have ever been involved with. And the TAM, it turns out, is massive.
A lot of our best investments at USV have gone this way. We invest early, when we like the product and the founder, and then over time the opportunity reveals itself to everyone (including the founder) to be a lot bigger than anyone thought. “Sharing what you had for lunch?”, “an API for text messages?”, “a search engine for jobs?”, “a Bitcoin wallet in the cloud?” and now we can add “cap table software?” to that list.