How Carta reduces days to minutes with generative AI
a conversation with Chief Marketing Officer Jane Alexander
AT A GLANCE
35,000
Corporate customers
>$2.5T
Trillion in equity managed
REDUCED
A day’s work to minutes
LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW
WATCH THE CLIPS
Carta headquarters
San Francisco, California
Industry
Technology
Key features used
Custom apps Knowledge Graph Style guide
Listen to the Carta story or read the (edited) story below
Writer is the generative AI platform for enterprises. We empower your people — product, operations, support, marketing, HR, and more — to maximize creativity and 10x productivity by transforming the way they work.
Our secure platform enables you to build just about any generative AI application on top of your business data sources, and delivers accurate answers and content that are fine-tuned on your own data and follow your own AI guardrails.
Jane Alexander is the chief marketing officer at Carta, where she leads the marketing, business development, and policy teams. Jane has played a crucial role in bringing Carta to market, and the company has more than doubled revenue under her leadership. During her time as CMO, Carta has been included on the Forbes’ World’s Best Cloud Companies, Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, and Inc.’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies lists. Read or listen to the story of how Jane and the teams at Carta use Writer to transform how they work.
Go-to-market goals at Carta boil down to two things. The first is we’ve added a ton of new products to the Carta product suite. So, not only do we do cap tables and venture capital fund administration, we also do liquidity, tax, and compensation products. We’ve been working on how we bring new products to market, and how we exercise new product and customer muscles, as well as more cross-sell muscles.
And number two, Carta is very much an index of the venture market. We serve startups and venture funds. So, when our customers suffer — as they have in the last year and a half or so — so do we. We’ve been thinking about how we can drive top-line growth efficiently, and Writer has been a huge help with that.
Using blog builder to create first drafts in Writer
I wish I could say, “I had so much foresight. I saw this years ago.” I didn’t. The time that it hit me was when ChatGPT made the big wave that it did, and suddenly all of these different use cases started coming up. My brand leaders started telling me that they would ask ChatGPT for the first version of a brief and that was the new quality bar that they had to beat. It was like a competition.
How did you develop evaluation criteria to adopt generative AI tools?
The way I evaluated generative AI came down to, “Will our team use it?” I had less of a theoretical framework for the different criteria that we needed, but what I knew was that I needed this to drive impact. I didn’t want this to be a science experiment; I wanted this to be something that drove the business forward.
We did a proof of concept with Writer. We worked with your team and used the product for a short period. And the bet was, if we can get this up and running, we can get it in people’s hands, they should be able to figure out how to drive impact within a month. And then if we use it for a year, we’re going to be in great shape with it.
Of course, security was important. But the biggest driver for us in evaluating tools is, if we start using the tool, how quickly do we see business impact? And with Writer, that was within weeks or a month.
“The big driver for us in evaluating tools was, if we start using the tool, how quickly do we see business impact? And with Writer, that was within weeks.”
Jane Alexander Chief Marketing Officer
Was the POC cross-functional? How did you choose a use case for the POC?
The starting use case for us was purely content and editorial. We wanted to know: can we do more effective and more efficient writing for our blog, especially SEO and case studies — things that have a little bit more of a template? Can we expedite those things? Can we expedite pure content editorial work?
To see what the possibilities would be, we started adding other folks from within the marketing team to see if there were any use cases beyond that. And not only did we find that these other use cases were almost stronger than the initial ones, but the strongest were those we didn’t even think of when we started the POC.
For example, one of our demand gen managers got their hands on Writer. The intent was to write quicker, better emails. They said, “listen, I think actually this could summarize the virtual event that we just had for our salespeople so they know what to say when they’re reaching out to prospects about it.” And they did that and it was like, lights out. They said it changed a whole day’s worth of work into minutes. Use cases that we didn’t even anticipate turned out to be lights out for us.
Using Recaps in Writer
How do you think about ROI in buying software? Did you find ROI with Writer?
There are a few different ways to look at this. There’s the pre-2023 way and post-2023 way. What I’m looking at is, if I have one person, what is the optimal output I can get out of that person. How do I make sure that most of their time is spent in the highest and best use possible? If I have a brilliant marketer, how do I make sure that every hour they’re spending working at Carta is the best use of their time?
The same is true when you’re on the front lines in marketing, when you’re writing copy, when you’re writing social posts, when you’re interfacing with other teams.
So the ROI that I was looking for was: if I have a set team of people who I believe are truly talented at what they do, can I get more quality work, creative work out of them by using Writer as a tool? And that for us has been like an absolute no-brainer.
“It changed a whole day’s worth of work into minutes.”
Jane Alexander Chief Marketing Officer
Are there pockets of adoption that have surprised you as Carta becomes AI-enabled?
What’s been surprising is the internal comms part of it. I expected this to be something that was from us to the external world and help us on pure content. I was hoping that it would help us on social. What I wasn’t expecting is that it would create more efficiency in how our team members talk to cross-functional team members, synthesize information, and draw insights.
“I expected Writer to help us on pure content. What I wasn’t expecting is that it would create more efficiency in how our team members talk to cross-functional team members, synthesize information, and draw insights.”
We’re excited about making sure that we’re getting different voices out there, not just the voice of Carta. I’m excited about Writer’s ability to help us in that way for two reasons. The first is I want us to be able to get more people’s voices out there more effectively, more efficiently. As CFOs get to know Carta more, they need to hear from a CFO, and we need to be able to do that effectively. But also, we’re going to be on new platforms. Threads is out there now, and we may have an ever-so-slightly different voice on Threads, like many brands do, than we do on X or on LinkedIn. I’m really excited for our ability to use Writer to develop these different nuanced voices.
Carta on Threads
Is there anything on the Carta AI roadmap that people should be on the lookout for?
We’ve got a couple things coming down the pike. When you onboard onto Carta, one of the things you do is you upload your articles of incorporation, your cap table — you upload a lot of information, and we sift through all of that. We help you build your cap table; we get everything so that it’s really squared away. That’s an incredible opportunity for us to use AI to speed up that work so that getting your cap table set up on Carta can be simple, seamless, and way faster. That’ll be really fantastic. A lot of the work that we do has to do with legal documents — and legal documents are perfect to be using this type of generative AI — because they’re so standardized, they’re so clear, and so we can have computers start to read these documents and help us. So you’ll see a lot coming from us both on the cap table side of the business as well as on the venture side.
