Henry Ward
The Disruptor
Contrarian and drawn to the edge; challenges the settled answer.
Henry Ward is The Disruptor because his founding logic at Carta ran toward uncharted territory before the problem was even fully legible. He did not optimize private equity record-keeping. He dematerialized it, working to dismantle an asset class that structurally excludes 99 percent of Americans.
“Team was a failure. It was like they were heroes for trying. And that's the most important thing. I have this another management thing. If a team does a bad job, you should be upset. And I have this rule with my execs. You should never show that you're upset. Full stop. There's no excuse for it.”
“Makes it tricky because when you enter new markets to be an end of one player, by definition, you have to go to relatively small markets because large markets are really hard to become an NFO one player. It takes a lot of time.”
“Money raised into these funds that's committed for a decade now, that it could very well be that private markets continue to be hot and continue to have a large valuations because all this capital needs to get deployed that's just sitting there, that's been committed for a decade, even as public markets repriced.”
“Shoulder to shoulder, desk the desk with them, helping them. I take those two sides, and 90% of the time I trust and let people go. And then the 10% of the time I'll sit and I'll invest with them.”
Masters in Business: “Carta CEO Henry Ward on Private Credit & Private Markets”
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