Today, Carta is announcing the launch of a new product: Carta Total Comp. It’s the first product of its kind and it’s going to be a game-changer for private companies grappling with questions around compensation.
Carta Total Comp is a tool that private companies can use to compare their salary and equity packages to market compensation rates using real-time data from the world’s most robust private company equity compensation data set.
We set out to create Carta Total Comp after our customers started asking us if we could help them pay their people easily, fairly, and competitively. We wanted to take the guesswork—and, frankly, a lot of the actual work—out of your compensation process. And we wanted you to be able to do it all on a single, integrated platform you already know and trust.
We support nearly 20,000 companies across the Carta ecosystem. And we know that they experience pain points at very specific moments in the compensation process: hiring, retention, and evolution. With Carta Total Comp we’ve created the tools to help you solve them all.
Hiring
One of the most important questions for new founders—and seasoned executives—is, “How much do I pay this person?” Unfortunately, the answer is also one of the most elusive. You might be calling friends and investors or, if you can afford it, relying on third-party databases for answers. You’re collecting compensation data from frustratingly fragmented sources. They might be outdated, underinformed, or unreliable. In the end, you’re left with the uneasy feeling of delivering an offer letter knowing it might be the wrong one for either your business or the candidate.
With Carta Total Comp, you’ll have access to real-time benchmarking data on salary and equity rates for every hire you make—from your first engineer to your fifth designer to your next executive appointment. We take a scientific approach to compensation bands using rigorous analysis and a broad and robust set of peer data. You can compensate with confidence.
Retention
A recent report by The Work Institute indicated that the number of employees quitting for reasons related to compensation and benefits has increased by more than 26% in the last 10 years. But it’s often the case that leadership teams lack visibility into when (and how) to adjust compensation to retain their employees.
For example: Are your first few engineering hires already 85% vested, and thinking about leaving? If so, does your equity refresh model need to be updated? Should you start thinking about liquidity? How do you compensate your team now that they’re in different locations in a remote-work world?
Carta Total Comp makes it easy for you to check in on the current value of your compensation packages, understand what it’ll take to retain people, and decide which steps you need to take to do exactly that. From there, your hiring managers can communicate with employees about updates to compensation and what their future looks like.
Evolution
The compensation process doesn’t happen just once, and it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Executives are constantly benchmarking, forecasting, scenario modeling, leveling, rewards planning, and more. These touchpoints are hugely important, but they don’t need to take so much time. Carta Total Comp streamlines the process by consolidating all your spreadsheets and systems. It makes it easy to regularly check in on compensation and to make sure your bands are where they need to be based on market trends.
Carta Total Comp is unlike anything else on the market. No other product provides this combination of salary and equity data. No other product offers the same kind of real-time data. And no other product is as integrated with the software that companies rely on to build their businesses.
With Carta Total Comp, a chief financial officer can finally get clear answers to questions like, “How much will this cost?” and “What does regional compensation look like in a remote-work world?” They can iterate on their compensation philosophies using the Plan tab, and will be soon able to calculate the impact of those new philosophies in the forthcoming Calibrate tab.
Using Carta Total Comp, a VP of people can generate a Scorecard to get a high-level view of compensation across their organization. If a VP of people or a CHRO is ever tasked with doubling a team after a fundraising round—they can be sure they’re hiring efficiently and equitably because their decisions will be based on hard data.
Thanks to Carta Total Comp, a first-time founder can easily benchmark early employees on our Bands tab to determine compensation on a platform they’re already using to manage their cap tables, valuations, investments, and equity plans.
Carta Total Comp will be indispensable across teams and organizations—freeing up time for you to focus on your mission, your product, your growth.
And that’s always been our goal at Carta. We are a startup solving problems for startups. A company of founders building solutions for founders. Employees creating products for employees. We build products to address challenges at various stages of growth, because we ourselves have faced those same challenges as we’ve grown.
This story started with our core cap table management platform. It continued last year with the launch of CartaX. And it continues this year with the launch of Carta Total Comp.
I can’t wait to share how this product evolves, and for what we build next.
If you’re interested in learning more about Carta Total Comp, we’d love to connect with you. Find some time with our team here.