As a product designer on the Investor Services team, part of my role has been to design for the problems and needs of our professional investor customers, who play a crucial role within the Carta ecosystem. Investors bring hundreds of portfolio companies onto Carta, exponentially expanding the private equity network.
The investor workflow includes interactions with multiple parties through an unreasonable number of mediums, complicating the receiving and handing off of vitally important information. Our goal is therefore to fundamentally improve the way investors work.
From Paperwork to Mobile
Within a venture firm, principals, associates, analysts, and back office employees work together to maximize fund profit. Spreadsheets, paper fund reports, and internal tools are used to provide the GPs with a high-level view of the health and progress of each ongoing fund. Based on user feedback, we focused on three things:
Information Accessibility — “Practically speaking, it’d be much better to have my Carta information on mobile. We reference the website before and during meetings because it’s better than spreadsheets but the navigation isn’t perfect for investors” — Union Square Ventures
Live Reports — “Continuously updated capitalization table reports across multiple funds would allow me to track both LP and other’s ownership. I’d like to be able to accurately compare my ownership in certain companies with other venture firms” — Spark Capital
Visualizing Progress — “When I’m on-the-go and pitching ideas for new funds and investments to LPs, I need to show how my current funds are doing and how my previous funds went. Currently it’s all documented in Excel” — K9 Ventures
Information Accessibility
The Carta website works well for employees, CEOs, and law firms, but the mobile app was optimized for investors. The navigation and content was therefore specific to this user group’s needs. Our intention was for increased contact between portfolio companies and investors, with Carta as the means of communication. This would increase the number of companies signing up for eShares, thus filling the gaps of information in the network.
Live Reports
We looked at the key components of GP weekly reports — the primary material referenced throughout the week — with the intention of replacing them with the app. The design organizes the information hierarchically and utilizes a familiar card format to flexibly account for more or less information.
Visualizing Progress
Instead sifting through pages of a report or endless columns on a spreadsheet, GPs should be able to see a high-level view of their portfolios with a graphical representation. This was designed specifically to be presented by users on-the-go.
Non-Investor Experience
We released the iOS app to a limited group of investor customers with little fanfare. Over the following weeks, however, we received multiple emails from non-investor users who were eager to be able to access Carta on their phones. To meet the demand, we designed an early limited experience for the broader audience.
Many users find Carta’s educational blog posts helpful for understanding the value of their shares, so our MVP included an equity resources section, dedicated to teaching new employees how to make the best of their stocks.
The Carta app was strategically planned for a particular audience, but we’ve acknowledged the demand from other groups. Our plan is to divide our efforts 75/25 between investor users and all other Carta users.
What’s Next?
We began investigating user metrics thoroughly at the outset of this project, and found that the vast majority of our non-desktop users were attempting to access their information on an iPhone. Before we had a mobile-friendly experience, the average use time was 1 minute 33 seconds, which has since more than doubled. We’ve validated the need for a mobile experience and will continue to build toward this vision.
The investor services team is strengthening the Carta network by obtaining more companies through their investors. To that end, the app will be made more actionable. The first step was providing the necessary content in an accessible way. Our next steps will be streamlining communication, allowing users to request and provide additional metrics.
