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00:00A lot of people don't understand how equity works. They don't understand how to negotiate for equity. Why do you think it's so important that people learn exactly what this means. Well we think the world is sort of in this era of payroll where people rent their time for money and the next era of labor compensation will be an ownership one the equity. And it's obviously started in Silicon Valley where you know it'd be weird to work for a company and not get equity. It doesn't. It's not true in other sectors or any other parts of the economy. So a big part of what we're trying to do is educate the world about equity as a way to create wealth and compensate people. It's weird that people you know I think in 50 years people would think it's crazy that we went to work for companies and all we got was cash that we got on a payroll system and that was it that we didn't own any of the company that we helped build. I think Silicon Valley is ahead of the world on that and hopefully the rest of the world will follow suit. Walk us through some of the lessons that you are teaching in this curriculum. Well so so last year half a billion dollars of stock option grants weren't exercised by employees. Most if you talk to employees about why they didn't exercise their stock option grants almost always because they didn't know how. They didn't know if they should. They didn't know what the implications were. So a big part of equity education right now is just helping employees understand what equity is how it invests what it's worth what the tax implications are and how to think about exercising that and getting liquidity on that. It's such an underserved community. You know so many employees work at startups and have no idea what the equity or capital structure of the business is. A big part of helping them figure that out is how do we realize that half a billion bucks that employees didn't get last year. How do we how do we put that back in their pockets now. One of the celebrities you've partnered with is Serena Williams and she has said she didn't know about equity until much later in her career. She wasn't taught this as a child. I actually had an opportunity to interview her about her new venture fund a couple of weeks ago when she talked about lessons that she's bringing to venture from the tennis court. Take a listen. It's really about having a winning attitude and really just about understanding that you have to put a lot of time into this you know and you have to put a lot of effort into learning. Why do you think financial literacy isn't taught to kids at a younger age. It's a great question Emily. I don't know when I was in high school. I had to take a class called Medieval History was required to graduate but nobody talked me out of balance. A checkbook. I don't know why schools don't teach financial literacy all the way from just you know how how do I plan a budget all the way to you know how do I evaluate a stock option grant for. For a company that I'm going to join. I think a big part of the private sector and where we can be helpful is creating education around that and sharing it with the world's. Now Carter is an equity management platform. But you face your own challenges with equity issues. You were sued by a former employee over gender discrimination and this was employee who wasn't in charge of some of your own equal pay efforts. I'm curious what you learned from that. Yeah it's it's a really tough one. The story around that wasn't that you know we may have not been fair in gender pay. The story was that we cared a lot about equality and we were hypocrites. I think it's really tough when you do these things. You know obviously we think we're we're not only a champion of equity but we practice it at home. People are allowed to disagree with that. And we'll figure it out where we're a couple of years into this. We'll probably a couple of years more. Carter meantime aggregates data about private companies valuations cap tables and in this very rapidly evolving macro environment higher inflation we're seeing startups doing down rounds. I'm curious what data you're seeing in terms of valuations being under pressure and how that'll translate into equity for employees. Yeah it's fascinating to watch. Obviously there's this great price resetting that's happening in the public markets. You know private markets tend to tend to lag the public markets largely because private private company CEOs don't have to enter transactions if they don't want to. And so once they see repricing happening in the private markets they don't necessarily reprice their companies. They'll just delay a financing and wait till markets correct in their favor. I think what's happening now is we're seeing still at the early and mid stages just record numbers of deals being done. So that hasn't slowed down at all. In the late stages we're seeing some of these deals get pushed out but we haven't seen a repricing happening. You know last year we did about seven billion dollars of secondary liquidity to be a card of access for employees. This year will probably be 10 to 12 million. And we haven't seen repricing happening in the late stage growth market. But we have seen deals get pushed further down as CEOs are waiting to see if they can reprice their stock in a way that they want to.

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Carta Launches Celeb-Backed Financial Literacy Classes

Carta CEO Henry Ward joins Emily Chang to discuss how his company is teaming up with Serena Williams, Kerry Washington, Alex Rodriguez, Tan France, Steve Nash and Ashley Graham to raise awareness about the power of having equity and to offer a free curriculum to help anyone get started. (Source: Bloomberg)

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