i've used pullrequest a bunch and had great experiences with the product and company.
mostly used it in small companies with 1-2 devs where it helps to get another pair of eyes on it. also, helpful as career development / learning for a junior dev.
1. gumroad experienced major covid tailwinds. whereas the company's five-year compound annual growth rate is 37%, it grow 94% from 2019 to 2020. they've been profitable since 2017.
2. gumroad's core customer base is creators making less than $10k/yr. gumroad is best positioned as an entry point for novice creators to start selling quickly and easily online. as creators cross the $10k/yr threshold, they become a churn risk because all-in-one products like kajabi and podia offer a more fully-featured product at the same price.
3. at the campaign's $100m pre-money valuation, gumroad will need to grow 40% yoy for 10 years to return double digit IRR.
a lot of questions in the discussion on what problem this solves . . . rather than thinking about cartaX as a 'private stock exchange'—which is pretty abstract—i think it's easiest to think of it as a solution to the problem of employee, founder and investor illiquidity in private companies.
problem: let's break down this problem of shareholder illiquidity generally.
- retention: employees bear the financial burden of illiquid stock because they often have greater liquidity needs than early investors and founders (who are able to take some off the table earlier). employees are the last to get liquidity because they're farthest from the money. check out our report on this https://sacra.com/research/tender-offer-pricing-data/
- admin: i've talked with CFOs who have to deal with one-off requests for secondary sales and it's an admin pain.
solution: companies have taken to running tender offers, often bundled into the latest round of financing. you could say that the tender offer is the incumbent in the 'liquidity solution' space that cartaX is trying to dethrone (though to be clear, carta has its own tender offer product).
what's different about cartaX? 2 things: (1) it has a market dynamic with competitive pricing and (2) T+0 settlement because carta has write access to the cap table.
there are a few important players in the 'liquidity solution' space otherwise that are big players as well:
companies like asana and coinbase ran auctions via npm. they have market-driven pricing but they do not have T+0 settlement. also, they mainly use npm as a feeder into listing on nasdaq, so they are less incentivized to promote the growth of the private markets generally (contra angellist and carta).
the upshot: cartaX is a liquidity solution for private companies, but because the solution comes through a competitive pricing in an auction, it creates this additional risk around not being able to know and control the price. this giving up control is hard for private companies who are used to controlling their cap table, price, scarcity of their stock, etc.
One thing that sucks about working at a startup is that the equity is illiquid until a liquidity event like acquisition or IPO.
There's been a rise in "recurring liquidity programs" where startups offer employees the opportunity to sell stock on a recurring basis. It's a big employee benefit where otherwise employees are stuck with illiquid stock that they can't sell if they need to buy a house or car.
We wanted to quantify how a recurring liquidity program can increase employees' liquid comp so we built this calculator.
If the company makes a certain percentage of an employees' shares available to be sold, say 15%, and the company is growing quickly enough, employees can make liquid comp on par with FB within 3-4 years and still have the upside of the equity they hold.
I agree with this. Follow up question: I've seen sites where HN comments appear in the source's comments (like trackbacks). Can someone point me how to do this with Posterous?
mostly used it in small companies with 1-2 devs where it helps to get another pair of eyes on it. also, helpful as career development / learning for a junior dev.
happy to answer any questions.