Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day -to -day interactions with developers.
It's about how an organization supports products as a whole.
The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers.
With the help of some boundary -pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader.
This is the Product Thinking Podcast.
Here's your host, Melissa Perry.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast.
Today, we are joined by Rushali Pounikar, the Chief Product Officer at Carta.
She leads the product development team at Carta responsible for delivering value to more than 30 ,000 customers in the venture and startup ecosystem and driving growth for the overall business.
Before becoming CPO, she played a crucial role in building the valuation business, scaling it to achieve software margins.
And later, she led the venture capital business from zero to over $80 million in annual recurring revenue.
She's also credited with envisioning Carta's fund admin platform known as Event -Based Accounting, which today supports over $100 billion in assets under administration.
Today, she's going to share with us the secrets to leading a successful product team at growth and how she navigated that at Carta.
But before we talk to Rushali, it's time for Dear Melissa.
So this is a segment of the show where you can ask me any of your burning product management questions.
Go to DearMelissa .com and let me know what they are.
Here's this week's question.
Dear Melissa, when I started two years ago, I was tasked at making our team more product -centric.
The product team started working in Agile using two -week sprints, understanding the problem space, and so on.
That was the easy part.
Then I tried pushing them to create a vision and strategy with OKRs so we could measure progress.
They created vision statements in their workshopping sessions, but after that, I didn't hear about their vision once.
The extent of their strategy is to get off a legacy system in order to handle more business.
It's frustrating because I'm trying to help them look around corners, but they are too busy to focus on that.
And then things break because they are too busy to look around corners.
Any advice? Yes, I do have advice on this.
This is actually why I love the Prada Kata and why I teach it because it helps exactly with this problem.
So what the Prada Kata does is it breaks down your big goals into smaller goals, but also asks important questions along the way that makes teams pause.
So what you would do with the team is say, OK, what is our goal?
And that could be a sprint goal.
It could be a release goal.
And we say, what is standing in the way of us reaching that goal?
Another way to say that, too, is what don't we know that could jeopardize this goal?
Are we making any assumptions?
Do we not know things?
All of this stuff is what should come up here.
And when you start to ask those questions, they should be ideating about what is around those corners.
We don't know this about our customers or we don't know this about our system.
Nobody has had time to go into the legacy code and figure out if it breaks.
We don't know if this breaks a scale.
Anything like that could be what is an unknown.
So you're identifying your unknowns.
And then we say, what's one small experiment that we can run to get more sure about that?
To actually address that problem or try to tackle it.
Now, you could actually address a problem and release a feature to a customer or put it live and see if it works.
Or you can run an experiment or do user research.
Or maybe a spike if it's more technical.
Spikes are where you would dedicate something like a week to understanding more about the problem, fiddling with the code, becoming more sure about it so that you can create a better plan.
So spikes should be into your agile cadence as well.
What happens is when you start to teach people about agile, and especially like two -week sprint agile, scrum, they just start scrumming.
They just start running.
Everybody's like sprint, sprint, sprint, sprint, sprint.
And nobody is pausing to actually think about what are we doing and why.
You should not be doing super back -to -back sprints constantly without coming up for error a little bit and identifying what's next.
And you should not be planning a full sprint, meaning the vision, the concept, where we're going, in that one sprint planning meeting.
That's for breaking down work and organizing it and prioritizing it for that sprint.
But we should have a better idea of what's coming up next and what the full picture looks like.
So I'd encourage you to maybe pause your teams.
Like, tell them to slow down.
Say, let's take like a sprint off.
We're not going to release anything.
Oh, my God. Everybody gets so nervous about that.
It's fine. You can totally wait two weeks to get a better handle on what you're building.
So maybe pause them there.
Run through the Pratakata.
Make them actually identify those unknowns, what those assumptions are, what they're kind of building off of, what they hope to happen.
And teach them to craft experiments or smaller spikes or anything like that that's going to help them learn and then iterate.
Once you really define what you should be doing, then you can put it into the sprint.
You can also make sprints of discovery work like that as well if you really feel dedicated to your two -week sprints.
This two -week thing for me is a tool to teach people how to break down their work and make it small.
But if it's causing problems in the long run and not helping you do better work, stop sprinting so fast.
Do something else. Try something else.
It's not like these golden handcuffs we should all be locked into with two -week sprints.
So maybe try the Pratakata approach.
Have these questions.
Pause everybody. Tell them time out.
Let's actually start thinking about this because the more you do it and the more that you repeat it, it becomes ingrained.
So they're going to start asking these questions themselves without you having to coach them.
That's why I like the Pratakata and that's what helps you see around corners.
So I hope that helps.
Let me know how it goes.
And for those of you listening, if you have any questions for me as well, go to DearMelissa .com and let me know what they are.
Now let's go learn more about Carta.
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Welcome to the podcast, Ruchali.
It's great to have you here.
Thanks, Melissa. So can you tell me a little bit about your product management journey and what led you to becoming the chief product officer at Carta?
So I started my career as a strategy consultant, as many of us have.
And I think that was a great way to get my start to product.
I actually had the privilege of starting up on the strategy consulting side of a company that was building its own analytics software.
So the strategy consultants were like the power users of the software, but they were also working with clients to help them implement it and use it.
And then I had the opportunity to transition over to the product side.
And that was such a great experience because I came from a perspective of being both a power user and really deeply understanding the software and also the customer problems, but also a deep sense of customer empathy.
So that was awesome.
It was a formative experience.
And in fact, today at Carta, I hire a lot of people from our client facing teams because I think those folks have like a unique advantage, I think, in the art and craft of product management.
Since then, I've had 15 year career in product with a theme of building products that are taking traditional services businesses and turning them into software businesses.
So I started off in strategy consulting.
I worked in ad tech after that, which was really fun.
And then the job before Carta, I was working in legal tech for almost five years.
At Carta, I actually started off on the valuations team.
So valuations was this very manual thing that finance analysts did.
And I got to work on a product that basically automated valuations and really turned that into a commodity.
And then I got the opportunity to sort of like, I was asked to do that again in fund administration.
Fund admin turns out way more complicated as a problem, but it's been such an incredible journey.
I got to join that business on day zero and really watch us stand up a services team, got the opportunity to learn the ins and outs of both fund admin and fund accounting and what it takes to serve this client base and got a chance to like articulate a product strategy that we've been executing on for the last
five years. So I got to take that business from zero to $100 million in ARR.
And then end of 2022, I had the opportunity to step up as our chief product officer.
I know Carta, I have companies that have shares in Carta.
So I get to use it all the time and see how things are vesting.
But for those people who don't know about it, you started off as more of like a system of record of tracking stocks, tracking options for companies, and allowing employees in so that they can actually see what shares they have, how they're vesting, all those different things.
But you've been expanding a lot.
Can you tell us a little bit about why did Carta get started?
What was the problem that you were trying to solve there?
What did it used to look like?
And what's been your journey through to the expansion through to the $100 million product lines that you have now?
We started by digitizing paper stocks.
Henry Manukumar, who was his co -founder, saw this problem where it was like really inefficient.
When you invested in a private company, what you got back was literally a piece of paper to record your ownership in that company.
And they just saw an opportunity to do this differently.
So we didn't start off by solving for cap table management.
Actually, we started off by digitizing paper stocks.
And I think it was like 20 bucks a share.
2024, or January 2024, was our 10 -year anniversary from our first share sold to our first customer.
But how that quickly evolved.
If you're using Carta to eShares at the time, eShares to issue all of your stocks or tickets, well, then you have the cap table, right?
You have the downstream system of record for ownership in your company, and that's the cap table.
So we sort of like quickly evolved stone building for company admins and cap table admins.
So then we became the cap table platform.
And that gave us this like incredible distribution with companies, right?
And we started seeing all of these like tangential problems to cap table management and equity issuance.
The second product I think we built was 4 .9.
If you were issuing options for to your employees, then you needed the like fair market value.
So you could record the strike price.
And so 4 .9a, to do that, you need like an outside accounting firm to sort of like opine on what is that FNB fair market value.
And in order to come up with the FNB, you need a cap table.
We have the cap table.
We have the companies on the platform.
And it was just like such a natural extension.
I think we were one of the first in the market to combine cap tables in 4 .9a.
And that sort of like was another inflection point of the business.
The 4 .9a created the buying moment for cap table management.
And then since then, again, we've been like finding these like messy, unsexy problems that were related to equity issuance and equity ownership and solving them by building seamless workflows.
So expense accounting, I think it was our third product.
Since then, we've built Carta Total Compensation, Equity Advisory, QSBS, which is like very relevant for early employees and early investors.
So the product suite for companies has really evolved.
But on the other side, one of the coolest things I think Carta did was from day one, because we started off as like digitizing paper stocks certificate, it was a network product.
You had to issue that certificate to a person, an investor or an employee, and that person created a portfolio on Carta.
And I think we weren't the first cap table management solution, but we were one of the first to take this approach where it was like a network product.
And I think you've probably had the experience many of your investors do.
It's so cool to be able to see all of your ownership and your shares in one place.
And for our investors who have information rights, they get to see their cap table.
The cap table can be directly shared through Carta and they get to see a live version of that cap table.
The company can set like the granularity or like the permission level for the investor, depending on their information, right?
So that was like an unlock.
That was our first network effect, and investors started asking their companies to use Carta to do their equity issuance.
And that started the first flywheel, I would say.
But it also won us the right to build for investors.
And so in 2018, when I joined the company, we got into the fund admin business and fund administration is basically outsourced accounting reporting for venture funds.
So they can focus on like what they do best, which is investing and fundraising.
And we take care of all of the burden of ownership.
We take care of all of the reporting and administration and even like help them execute on like the key fund events, capital calls, distributions, investments.
And fund admin is a really cool business because in terms of like mindshare, like our customers are interacting with Carta on a daily basis because we are their fund admins.
And again, that sort of unlocked our ability to add other products and offerings.
Actually, even before we launched the fund admin business, we were doing valuations for investors.
We were doing portfolio management for investors.
But since then, we've added compliance offerings, KYC and AML.
We've added a loan product called for capital call lines.
The latest product that I'm really excited about, Fund Tax.
If we own your accounting, what's a natural extension of that?
Funds have to issue K1s to their investors on a yearly basis.
But we can automate a lot of that because we have we have 90 percent of the data to start with.
Right. So then we have to get acquired the last 10 percent and build sort of the automation on top.
So last year we launched our fund tax business.
And it's now one of the fastest growing products at Carta.
Your K1 issuance, too, is so much faster than some of the other ones I've gotten.
It's been like after the taxes were due, I was like, wait a minute, like where did this come from?
So I love that you you saw all those synergies right there and expanded with that, though.
You were talking about the fly wheels that you saw and the opportunities.
And it sounds like Carta has a million opportunities to go after.
How do you as a chief product officer and also as a leader at the organization identify which opportunities to go after?
Because I see a lot of companies kind of struggle with doing everything, especially when you're scaling.
You're like, let's do it all.
How are you looking at all these different adjacencies and these problems to solve and prioritizing what you should go after?
I'll be honest, like we constantly grapple with this like depth versus breadth problem.
And it's interesting that like you rewind all the way back to our cap table management days.
And the number one reason I wasn't around in our series eight, but like I have read about it and I have gotten to talk to Henry about it.
The number one reason that investors rejected us in those early rounds was they're like cap table management.
That's such a small market.
You'll never be like a hundred million dollar business building cap tables.
But today the cap table business is a three hundred million dollar business like Carta.
So like surpass our like wildest expectations for how big these markets could be.
But we always had this like paranoia like we because we went off after these like small markets and these niche problems that won us the right to solve the next tangential problem.
Right. And that's always been our approach at Carta.
So I would say like I think for the first like six to seven years of the business, we were going wide like we were experimenting with a lot of ideas and problems all at once.
And then we would like double down on the ones that resonated and move on from the ones that didn't.
Now we're at like a different phase of the business where we're about deep and not wide.
I think we have the businesses that we think we need to have for like the next decade of Carta's growth.
And it's really about going deep and really like creating state change in the private markets and ownership management of private capital.
And so the answer to how do we make trade us has shifted pretty drastically in the last couple of years where when I started we were definitely in the like plant a lot of sleet seeds and nurture a lot of ideas.
And now we're definitely about like double down on things that are working go deep and create like truly differentiated experiences.
You mentioned a little bit about solving the smaller problems that won you the right to go after the bigger problems.
How do you identify those?
Because I feel like a lot of leaders will go out there and if a product manager or somebody surfaces up something small, they'll be like, oh, well, I want to know what the potential is of this problem to solve and not necessarily the thing after it.
Like, how do you think about the steps that are involved when you do something smaller versus bigger and how to line those up?
One of the things people at Carta do really well, and I think one of my strengths is like that, like systems thinking, but the market level of that systems thinking is like understanding what things are connected.
Knowing that like digitizing paper stocks or certificates can lead you to this like larger problem of equity administration for private companies.
That was like a part of the original vision and like how that led to solving products for investors and how that led to building like transactions and capturing private market transactions on the Carta platform was like all a part of the original vision.
So I think we've always had a perspective of like, where are we today and what are like the next five problems we can solve?
Even today, we know that.
And what we're really practicing today is like discipline online going deep again.
But we know as soon as we like get those right and pass like the threshold of depth, we can sort of like stick our head out and like we know the next five problems we'll probably take on.
But how do we know if a problem is like big enough for us?
I think that the answer to that has changed as well, like what was a great investment and a great like allocation of capital 10 years ago is very different than today.
And so, you know, our bar is getting higher in terms of like what are big enough problems for us to solve, but we are also just like mindful of this might not be a big problem, but is it an unlock to a bigger problem and is that strategic for us?
So I think we do the thing that like many companies do now that is pretty normal, which is we're looking at the tan.
We're looking at how big the problem is because of where we came from solving small problems like cap table management, which want us the right to do so many of these other things.
We also asked ourselves, well, if we do this, what does it give us the right to do next?
And then we're evaluating then the entirety of that idea, not just like step one.
I think it's a testament to really focusing on visions to having that long term and not just looking at what's right in front of you.
How do you encourage your team to focus on long term?
Like do you take time out to think about longer term visions?
Like what kind of communication do you expect from your product managers to help make sure that they are focused on what's coming next?
I think here we have an advantage because we have a founder who's such a visionary.
It's been his vision that we've been building against for the last decade of this company.
And today we're at an inflection point because the vision that he articulated 10 years ago was still something we were building to up until this year.
And now we're at an inflection point where we start off as like digitizing paper stocks certificates and building cap table management and sending out confetti emails to everyone who was vesting shares on Carta to really shifting and thinking of ourselves as building infrastructure for private capital
and for the private markets.
And so one of the things Henry has been doing is articulating a new vision for the next decade of Carta.
He calls it the ERP for private capital.
The tagline is still a work in progress, but one of the things we're doing now.
I just had an offsite with my product leadership team two weeks ago and we started taking that and turning it into the building blocks of what will be our product strategy.
So like what does it break down into?
What does it mean that we're doing for companies?
What does it mean that we're doing for investors?
Which types of investors are we going after?
Which asset classes will we address in the next decade?
And then what does it mean for capital allocators?
And what do we think we'll do for the LP node?
And so as product leaders, our job is to turn that vision into a strategy.
But then we have sort of the outlines of like where we know we're going for the next decade.
And then it's just like a time horizon question.
We're not like, do we do this or do we not do this?
The question is really, do we do this now?
And why do we think now is the right time to do this?
You guys have grown extremely rapidly in the last, especially like last five years too.
What are your biggest challenges as a product leader when it comes to hyper growth?
Breath of problem sets.
Everything we've taken on is incredibly complex, incredibly nuanced.
You have to like really go deep and understand these problems such that you can build software that truly solves the problem and resonates with your audience.
I think as a product leader, it's just the sheer breath of we're operating like everything from tender offers and four or nine A's and valuations.
I'm like knowing what a Black -Scholes model and options pricing models are two things we're doing in fund administration.
And even fund admin is just like such a wide problem set between all of the things that we're doing for what it takes to manage these funds end to end.
So I think the breath is like our biggest challenge and like having the context.
I find myself incredibly lucky because I have been at Carta for six and a half years and I've gotten to work across a few of our different businesses, especially starting on valuations.
In order to like really learn valuations, I needed to learn cap tables, right?
Like you can't actually value an asset without understanding like the liquidity stack and rights and preferences.
So learn cap tables and valuations in my early days and then like have had the privilege of like starting and growing the fund admin business from ground up.
I have a lot of context on a lot of these things and but even when I transitioned from a VP of our fund admin org to the CPO job, there are a lot of other things I had to go learn.
But having context and knowing some pieces of the puzzle and just even knowing like these are businesses that were in and having some like high level understanding of what those were about was helpful.
But especially as a product leader, like I do weekly product reviews with my team for me to give them like meaningful feedback about their products.
I like need to understand these domains.
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And did you know a lot about the domains coming in or what did you do to get up to speed on the things that you didn't know about?
I didn't. I remember being asked what a cap table was in my interview and I sort of like fumbled through that.
I apparently I answered that well enough to land a spot at Carta.
But yeah, I knew very little.
Starting on the valuation stream again was like incredibly helpful.
They sent me a lot of books before I started and yeah, I just like read these like heavy textbooks on valuation accounting principles and like how valuations is in art and science and what are the different methodologies and which methodology we should use depending on the stage of company.
And I think this is like such an important skill for product managers at Carta to just be incredibly good at learning new domains.
I think that's like one of the things that really sets Carter product managers apart.
I think one of the things there are incredibly good at is like learning and learning these deep and complex domains and you can learn in whatever way that suits you.
For me, it's a combination of like doing the work, reading the books and reading the textbooks, but then like talking to people and seeing the math and like reverse engineering the math and Excel.
And I'm such a, you know, this is another thing I talked a lot about with my product team.
I'm such a first principles thinker.
It's not enough for me to know well how accounting works.
I want to know why it works the way it does.
And so when I started working on fund accounting, I actually like went and read about the history of accounting.
And that was so helpful for me because if you truly understand why things are the way that they are, it enables you to like ask the questions you need to be asking in order to drive true innovation in a problem area.
And I won't go into like accounting speak, but like I have like several examples of things in accounting where I asked the question, why does a chart of account exist?
And if you're building relational databases, do you even need a chart of accounts?
And there are many ways we've like innovated on that idea at Carter, but like it starts from like really understanding each of these concepts, but also why they exist.
When you are interviewing product managers to be on your team, how are you assessing if they're capable of learning these different domains?
I think curiosity and like the ability to learn are very overlapping.
So one of the things I like to suss out is how curious someone is, especially about we're not building sexy like messaging tools like we're building a very specific kind of product.
And I just know sometimes when I'm talking to candidates, they like their eyes light up and like how they ask questions about equity or evaluations or accounting.
And you can tell they're like deeply curious about these problems and they're doing the connecting of dots in their head.
And you can just tell.
And I think that's like one of the greatest signals you have about like a person's ability to learn is like the curiosity that they demonstrate in the interview process.
There's a really big debate out there too with product management about whether you should hire subject matter experts or you should hire people with the ability to learn.
It sounds like you are in the ability to learn camp.
How do you like evaluate whether you need a subject matter expert here or somebody can actually learn?
I'm a big fan of hiring people who are just curious and have the ability to learn and they're going to fall in love with these problems.
And also the thing about just like hiring great product managers is they can like do the pattern matching and the pattern recognition.
They bring in patterns from other domains to create innovation.
But I do actually hire subject matter experts and I'm a big fan of like T -shaped teams where you bring in subject matter experts that go deep and help the R &D team around them really really learn a domain.
Let you pair them up with product managers who are like the systems thinkers and are going to match and do the pattern recognition.
So it's a combination of both.
I mentioned I hire a lot from our client facing teams.
Well to again these people have deep customer empathy but the other reason is because they're also they tend to be domain experts and that's really valuable for the types of products that we're building at Carta.
There's some teams that have like for financial products or things that have to go really deep.
They'll have like a subject matter role rather than making them product managers.
Do you do anything like that or are they all just product managers?
I have a point of view on this and then there's exceptions.
So my point of view is like your subject matter expertise grows stale over time because it's only going to be fresh if you're a practitioner.
But as soon as you stop practicing it's going to grow strails.
That as an asset is diminishing.
So we tend to hire these SMEs where we see their like inclination to be like great product thinkers and great product managers.
So our general approach is hire some of our client facing teams who are SMEs where we see their ability because we have like asymmetric information about them because they work at Carta already.
We see sort of their inclination for some of those like systems thinking and the ability to take a problem and think about a software solution to that problem.
At the same time there's exceptions.
One of those exceptions we have this incredible person on our Carta total compensation team who spent like decades as a comp consultant and a comp advisor for various companies big and small.
And he's just brilliant and he I think like everything from like reviewing our data to like thinking through our target audience and at companies in the office of the CPO, the chief people officer.
He's been like so helpful and so he actually does do some amount of product work but he continues to be like very valuable to us as a SME.
There was one thing you said too before that I want to touch on where you said you're looking at all the older accounting stuff and things like chart of accounts and finding these areas where now you understand why it exists but you're able to innovate on them.
How do you balance like innovating on things like accounting right that's been around there for so long that some businesses have one way of just doing it but you're seeing some inefficiencies like how do you weigh where you can actually disrupt things?
Maybe that have been the status quo for so long and there's an opportunity there and how do you get customers comfortable with that?
This is where not being you know accounted for 30 years is really helpful when I started building our platform for fund accounting.
One of the things we took on was we built a purpose built general ledger for fund accounting.
So instead of using like a third party GL because there's like so many out there we decided to build our own and everyone was just like you're crazy why are you doing that?
And I'm like well we could just do it so much better because if we build our own we can like connect it to like the things that are already happening in Carta.
We have the cap tables and if there's a cap table event you can emit that event over to the general ledger and the GL can get automatically updated and that's actually it works and it's really cool.
But the thing is yes it's very complicated as well and you know we've been working on this for six years now naivete helps.
Having a fresh perspective and not knowing sometimes all of the reasons things can go wrong is helpful and just to be bold and try something and some things are going to stick and some things are not.
And I'm so thankful that we didn't listen to the sort of naysayers because now again we have a hundred million dollar business on top of this general ledger that we built from ground up.
But now again now we're at this like next inflection point or here all the cool really cool things we can do that we think are real differentiators.
And again like I think there's naysayers for like that can never be done like you'll never get real time accounting you will never be able to do switch between the cash version of books and the cruel versions of books and we try to like understand why and then also as a counterpoint what can we do differently
or what is possible now that wasn't possible before.
And I think like a lot of those answers are like within Carter we have built such a unique and special foundation that creates unlocks and no one in the industry can replicate so recognizing that is really important.
But also the other thing I've learned is like validate that that unlock is truly something that someone wants that we're not just innovating for the sake of innovating but like it's an innovation that leads us to a place that leads us to a world that people want to live in.
So Henry's been like writing a lot about the vision of the company I've been like turning that into pieces of the strategy and I've been like emailing out these little strategy snippets to customers and friendlies in our network and just getting their feedback.
What's resonating what's not resonating where are the words not making sense and that's been so helpful to validate and also invalidate some of the things we thought would be unlocks.
I like that kind of perspective and I try to tell some organizations there's a lot of large organizations I work with going through transformations where there's a million subject matter experts and I feel like when you get into your domain and you know it really well.
And you only know your domain right it's really easy to be like no that's impossible or that's not how we do it here right like this is not what we're doing and what's fresh about I think your perspective is like well why not let's like let's try it and that's how you get innovation and see how you
get 300 million dollar business that you're doing.
Totally and again it's like because you know we started with a small problem I think the naysayers are like this will never work because have you thought of this like one edge case over here like okay well maybe we will never solve that case.
But it is like worth it for the thousand customer you know the thousand funds over here that are actually doing it all the same and we can create a truly differentiated solution for them and then like the other thousand that where we can differentiate in this way.
So it adds up and I think it's like always worth it to think about from a first principles perspective what can you do differently here and where does that get you and is that a world that people want to live in.
When you're trying to encourage that mindset in your team is there anything that you do specifically to help them like not be naysayers or not worry about the edge cases because I know a lot of people can get really caught up in those.
So this is like a company principle like ask what can go right not what can go wrong so it's a top down cultural aspect of the company and I don't feel like I have to coach my team on this because it's so ingrained in our culture we are such a what can go right type of board and culture so that's really
fun and one of the things that I say explicitly do.
To start like generating some of this thinking and some of these ideas like I love to get groups of people where we just like riff on ideas we just like start dreaming.
About the future and what's possible and I will like pick a topic allocations for fun sorry like funds are pass through entities which means anything that happens.
At the fun level gets passed through to to all of its partners but there's all sorts of like rules in the fun documents legal documents on how this happens like how you do innovation on that and just will like plan to sleep and people start riffing love those because I think there's this so much like
generative thinking.
That inspires which is to carve out time at offsides and team meetings to do that as is always a great way to encourage that type of thinking.
So a lot of the product managers out there to listening here are probably thinking about stock and their compensation as well and what's normal or we've got product managers as well I think you want to start companies.
Since you've got this really unique perspective on you know what companies are doing and what's normal and how does this play out.
Over time, can you tell us maybe a little bit about let's maybe start with founders like if you're a product manager you want to start your own company.
What should you know about giving out equity compensation that you think a lot of people might have misconceptions on.
First of all, you should look at Carta data.
We put so much incredible data out there.
Peter Walker who's our head of data insights has like various publications I think looking at Carta data as a reference point just as a starting point highly recommend.
The other thing is like, it's so dependent on context right.
I recently did a talk at startup grind about start up equity and things to keep in mind.
And one of the slides was, what do you pay your first 10 employees and like we showed the slide where it was like the median equity compensation for your first employee is 1%.
And then it sort of like goes down from there and like there was several things I like call that like well if you if you notice there's a big difference between employee one and employee 10.
But in terms of risk, they're actually taking like a similar amount of risk there's probably not a huge difference between how your company's grown between one and 10.
So, again, it's like a good reference point.
But the reality is to those are medians and we see a full range.
And so how you compensate early employees is really a function of a million factors including their levels of experience their value to you, their seniority, etc, etc.
So do what's right for you, because you're in it to not only get through like day one, but start what will be hopefully a multi generational company.
And so if you're in it for the long game, building your team is so important, get the right people on board to help you, but be thoughtful about equity, obviously, be careful about overcompensating early employees, but if it is a key hire for you, then pay that person the right amount right.
So it's an art and a science.
But as far as the science goes, use Carta data.
It's like readily and freely available up there or publishing quarterly updates on this data.
So it's a really great resource.
It sounds like that's gonna be useful to for people who are not necessarily starting their own company, but are thinking about joining different stages of startups or growth stage companies.
Totally. Yeah, we're doing this thing called friends at carta .com and you can like email us in if you're considering a job offer or you're thinking about like how you should you be thinking about equity and cash compensation or email you back some insights about some of the data points we see based
on like stage and sector that you're considering a role in.
Well, thank you so much for Shelley for being on the podcast.
If people want to learn more about you, where can they go?
You can find me on Twitter at art, shawley, A -R -T -S -H -A -L -I and then on LinkedIn as well for shawley county group.
Great. And we will link all of those resources to for shawley's social medias and to Carta and to Carta data and friends at Carta on our show notes at product thinking podcast .com.
Thank you so much for listening to the product thinking podcast.
We'll be back next Wednesday with another amazing guest.
And in the meantime, if you have any product management questions for me, go to dearmelissa .com and let me know what they are.
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