Transcript of my Q&A with Seth Kimmel of Contrary Capital — For Today’s Q&A, we have Ron Pragides.Ron is currently the VP of Engineering at Trustly. Previously he was an engineering lead at Carta, AppDirect, BigCommerce, Twitter, and Salesforce, as well as an advisor to many startups. Welcome! I like to get a sense of how people got to where they…

“Over the past year, Trustly has seen significant growth, both in Europe and North America, with North America now representing close to half of total group revenue compared to around one-fifth a year ago.” — Johan Tjärnberg. Trustly CEO Our Engineering team scaled in response to the growth of…

We’re swimming in an ocean of information about Stock Option Pools and the promise of future liquidity. Each year, a new wave of advice washes upon the shore. Let’s dive right into the deep end… Prepare Your Company (Y Combinator) The market figure for a Series A option pool — by far — is an…

Companies across the globe are embracing a new reality: more work can be done remotely. This trend is not new. Companies like Automattic (founded in 2005) and GitHub (founded in 2008) were intentional in hiring a completely distributed workforce. Due to the COVID pandemic (and social distancing mandates), employers learned…

The term Black Swan was made famous by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book of the same name, which he describes as an event that has three attributes: (1) it is an outlier, outside the realm of regular expectations; (2) it carries an extreme impact; and (3) in spite of…

My journey at Carta is coming to an end. I’m thankful to have been part of the mission to Create More Owners: Employees sit on the debt stack of a firm, while owners sit on the equity stack... But what if issuing equity were as easy as paying payroll? …

Is Housing a Right or a Commodity? — Human Rights and the United Nations In March 2017, Lailani Farha — the Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing — presented to the UN General Assembly a report on the “Financialization of Housing” and its impact to human rights. …

To be cultural, to have a culture, is to inhabit a place sufficiently intensive to cultivate it — to be responsible for it, to respond to it, to attend to it caringly. — Edward S. Casey Agriculture — the science of cultivating plants and livestock — was a key milestone…

I joined Carta in February, and it’s been a whirlwind! But my experience with Carta began even before my first day on the job. While waiting for my first day, I was pleasantly surprised by the new hire welcome package that was shipped to my home. After opening the package…