Democratizing Access to Equity
When we participated in the seed round for Madrid-based Ninety Nine, the first Spanish company bringing zero-commission brokerage to Spain & Latin America, it was with the perspective that democratizing access to ownership matters.
When E*Trade brought brokerage to the Internet in the early 1990s from a small Palo Alto office, Wall Street heralded it as crazy. When Robinhood pioneered zero-commission brokerage from a mobile phone they turned the line at Starbucks into the trading desk where a twenty-something buyer could invest in the markets. Not dissimilar from the early 1990s, incumbents heralded it as irresponsible, and claimed that investing had been turned into a dangerous game. While qualifications, proper information and risk tolerance are undoubtedly necessary for more complex things like trading options, these apps fundamentally democratized access and gave anyone the tools formerly reserved for the few who could call their stock broker.
“Equity is the atomic unit powering the entire stack of entrepreneurship… Without equity, it’s not possible to align incentives in a way that is attractive to highly skilled employees relative to other employment.” - Tribe Capital
Carta, the de facto platform for all things equity management, isn’t dissimilar. Carta offers a platform for companies, employees, investors, and limited partners to manage their private equity ownership, or illiquid shares of stock in a company. These shares of stock, these atomic units of ownership, are the currency of business, and Carta believes that by democratizing access and the feasibility of buying and selling these units, they can provide greater degrees of freedom for wealth generation and transfer.
As investors in all three of these platforms, we see financial access and the democratization of markets and equity as a continuing theme, and we agree with Tribe Capital that equity is the atomic unit of entrepreneurship. Read more about the latest Series F rounds in Carta and Robinhood, and the launch of Ninety Nine.
Carta Series F with Lightspeed