Engineering at Carta: Building a culture of inclusive innovation
Since 2017, when we opened an office in Rio, the first question we often hear from job candidates is, “What is Carta?”
Carta is a startup based in San Francisco, California. It has offices across the United States, as well as in Canada, Singapore, Australia, and Brazil. Carta was founded in 2012; in August 2021, it was valued at $7.4 billion U.S. dollars.
Carta’s mission is to create more owners. We help people participate in the wealth that is generated by privately owned companies, which are not yet traded on the public stock markets. This wealth is held in equity, or shares of ownership in those companies. Founders of private companies give some of this equity to investors in exchange for cash to grow their businesses. They often also give equity to their employees as part of their compensation, in addition to salary.
Carta makes it easier for founders, investors, and employees to manage their equity. We started out with a product designed to help companies and investors manage their cap tables. (A cap table is a list of people and groups that, through their investments, own a percentage of a private company.) Simplifying cap table management is a major problem in the U.S., where private companies often have hundreds or thousands of owners. It’s not a problem that has made its way to Brazil: Most private companies in Brazil don’t offer equity to their employees as part of their compensation — but that’s something we’re hoping to change.
Building a team that’s right for Brazil
We’re often asked: Why does Carta have offices in Brazil, and what’s it like working across cultures and time zones?
Carta has worked with a team in Brazil since the company’s early days, when Carta was still known as eShares. Tech is a highly competitive industry, which means that engineering talent can be hard to find and retain. In 2015, Carta’s CEO, Henry Ward, believed it was time to look for talented engineers beyond the Bay Area. After some research and reaching out to local talent in Brazil, eShares Brazil was born.
Today, Carta’s culture is international; the company has offices on four continents. Our Brazilian teammates interact with people in each of our locations. Depending on their engineering focus, their teammates might be product managers, product designers, or other engineers. Some teams are fully resourced by engineers in Brazil; others include engineers in both the U.S. and Brazil.
As an international company, we’ve learned that there are things to consider when employees are located around the globe. Ways of doing business are different across cultures. It can also be difficult to communicate across thousands of miles and multiple time zones.
Carta has worked hard to address these challenges. I spoke with Preeti Kaur, vice president of engineering at Carta, to find out more about how she works with the team in Brazil. Preeti is based in Carta’s San Francisco office. When she joined Carta almost three years ago, Preeti scheduled 1:1 meetings with every Carta engineer in Rio, along with other members of the Carta Brazil team, to learn what the company needed to do to build a culture of inclusion.
“It starts with understanding those pain points that come from working in different locations and cultures,” Preeti explained. “We asked ourselves, ‘What makes people feel included and psychologically safe at work?’ We then organized a psychological safety committee with people all across the organization in Brazil. We realized that we needed more interaction, ways to break down cultural communication barriers, and unified standards, so people could properly hear and contribute in meetings.” Preeti and her colleagues also thought about how to create more inclusive communication: “We added benefits that included paying for English lessons and public speaking classes. And we trained managers to facilitate meetings so that people see the speakers and the audience, rather than the backs of heads.”
This logic of inclusion extended to ways to overcome time differences between offices: “We have offices where the time zones roughly match, so we build teams trying to align within time zones — that matters more than the exact location. New York and Waterloo, Canada, roughly match the working hours of the Rio office, so we align those teams. We also have four hours that are core hours shared by all, and we expect that those core hours will involve a lot of meetings.”
Physical presence and representation also proved to be key. “We started visiting the Brazil office to meet people face to face a lot more,” Preeti said. “Our CEO Henry Ward went to Brazil and led a few all-company ‘town hall’ meetings from the Rio office, so others could experience what it feels like not to be in the central office.” Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Carta also facilitated a culture of travelling between offices, which allowed us the opportunity to meet other Cartans face-to-face. Travelling gives Cartans based in Brazil the opportunity to visit and experience the culture of our other offices. This provides our Brazilian teammates with insights into what it’s like to live and work in Silicon Valley or New York City — and it allows our international colleagues to visit our stunning beachfront office in Rio de Janeiro. We hope to resume this tradition after the pandemic.
Preeti and her team also wanted to ensure that the engineering culture at Carta was sensitive to regional and national circumstances: “We make decisions about each office based on the realities of what’s going on there,” Preeti continued, “For example, we know that Brazil’s needs are different during COVID-19, and we make sure that we’re supporting our employees appropriately. When the pandemic hit, every area got a benefit based on what they would need. In Rio, electricity and data can be very expensive. So when the team had to work from home instead of the air-conditioned office, Carta found ways to offset costs that had shifted to employees.”
Creating talented teams
Understanding culture is crucial to recruiting and maintaining a great team. Our engineering hiring plan relies on a recruiter based in Brazil and a hiring committee that seeks feedback from across Carta’s engineering teams, including employees from the Rio office. This makes sure the company isn’t making assumptions about what makes a great employee.
To succeed in our mission, Carta’s recruiting process has to be very thoughtful. Before I joined Carta, I’d worked for several years in startups based in Brazil. I decided it was time to expand my horizons and start working for international companies — not only to develop my English skills, but to continue growing my technical and soft skills while working with people from different cultural and tech backgrounds.
As I began interviewing, I could tell that Carta was really special. The interview process was transparent, with a high technical bar and attention to details that made me comfortable in every session. Everyone involved in the process was friendly, helpful, and willing to support me to do my best throughout the interviews. After each interview, I got more and more excited about the possibility of joining Carta: it became clear that the traits I admired were spread across the company.
After a few interviews, I got an offer letter. The information was clear and well explained. The recruiter spent 15 minutes going through the offer with me in detail, including the benefits and perks. They made sure I understood how equity compensation works and what the current value of the equity award would be, since this was new to me. I was amazed that I would begin accruing equity in the company from my very first day. The equity offering, combined with the thoughtful hiring process, made me feel like part of the company before I even joined. And it made me even more eager to start.
From an employee’s first day, they’re set up to be fully included at Carta. Each employee spends their first three days with a cohort of other new recruits from across the company. They get to know how the different areas of the business work and have an opportunity to meet other Cartans, both new and experienced. Engineers then join Carta Engineering Bootcamp to meet other engineers across teams. We designed the bootcamp to help new engineers understand what we do at Carta, how we do it, and where to turn for answers or help when we’re stuck. This time spent onboarding helps everyone on the team feel connected and better able to do their jobs right from the start.
Growth is important at Carta. Standards are very high, but they’re the same across all offices and teams. Carta also values transparency, which is crucial to employee growth: Carta’s engineering levels describe the skills and responsibilities at each level, as well as how to get there. In Brazil, we work on the same products, have the same career paths, and are exposed to the same innovation opportunities as engineers throughout the organization.
Solving important problems
A great engineering team is one that solves great problems. At Carta, we work on problems that have never been solved before. That means we don’t have any previous reading material to guide our approach to those problems. We’re creating engineering thought leadership as we build.
The problems we’re working to solve will shape the world for the next few years. They will fundamentally change things like employee benefits and wealth generation. We need to be creative, think outside the box, experiment with “proof of concept” projects, and ship innovative solutions that have never been tried before.
For example, the team in Brazil recently worked with our colleague Natalie Vicas on Carta Launch, a platform with free startup tools for early-stage founders of small businesses. As Natalie said, “Launch is a way to support small business founders from the very beginning stages. It’s really important to us to help these people grow.”
Natalie’s team developed a real-time account creation workflow, which allows founders to create their own accounts immediately. They also built a new onboarding flow. These important projects required a lot from the engineering team. Our team was able to solve these problems on a tight timeline thanks to our shared culture of collaboration. When I asked her to reflect back on the experience, Natalie told me, “Every engineer I work with has a full understanding of the vision: what they’re building, and why it’s important. Everyone’s a part of the team. We all care a lot.” I couldn’t agree more.
The opportunities Carta provides engineers are unique and enriching. The company has helped me acquire skills that I wouldn’t have been able to develop while working at a company whose operations were limited to Brazil. I can easily say that accepting Carta’s job offer was one of the best career decisions I’ve ever made. The growth I continue to experience, both personally and professionally, makes me wake up each day cheerful and willing to make a difference!
If engineering at Carta sounds interesting to you, apply here.
