How Perkville uses Carta to automate equity and compensation management

Sunil Saha still remembers the pain of trying to manage Perkville’s cap table before Carta.

“It was just so much paperwork,” said Sunil, who co-founded Perkville, a customer reward platform in the health, fitness, spa, and retail industries, in 2010. “You had to get all the signatures, keep track of grants and exercises in a spreadsheet, and then constantly make sure your spreadsheet was accurate and up to date.

“With Carta, we automated all that work, which easily paid for itself—even at an early stage.”

Sunil says keeping your cap table organized pays major dividends later—and is far preferable to having to clean up a cap table that started off on spreadsheets.

“It’s a lot harder to clean up a mess afterward than prevent it,” said Sunil. “So I tell new founders: if you can start your cap table clean and organized from the beginning, it’s so much easier than having to come back later to fix it.”

Automating Perkville’s cap table management freed up Sunil and his team to focus on integrating Perkville with platforms across diverse verticals. While building these integrations, Sunil realized how cumbersome the process was and founded a second company, Middle, an integration platform-as-a-service designed to ease integration pains for businesses.

As his companies grew, Sunil trusted Carta’s platform for more than just cap table management. He came to rely on Carta to help him with compensation planning and management, as well as equity and tax advisory services for his employees.

Compensate competitively with Carta Total Comp

As Perkville grew to hundreds of customers and millions of users, Sunil needed to grow his team to keep up with demand. “We were trying to figure out how much to pay our employees both in terms of salary and equity,” said Sunil.

“Since Carta Total Comp has so much private market equity and salary data, I felt confident using the benchmarks to make competitive offers. The data helped us ensure we were paying fairly without overpaying.”

Carta helped Perkville not only proactively manage its employee compensation programs, but also align with its board of directors on its compensation philosophy.

“Total Comp was super helpful when communicating with the board. Since we’re a startup, we can’t compete with a lot of the larger companies in salary. So we needed to be able to grant equity to attract and retain employees,” said Sunil. “I used Total Comp’s data to show our board where we stand on compensation and equity relative to the market and then use this data to convince the board to grant stock options to our team.”

Offer actionable equity and tax advice for employees

Once Perkville started issuing options, it began getting questions from employees about how their stock options were taxed, which it felt was best left to professionals.

“With Carta Equity Advisory, our employees get access to professional tax advisors who specialize in startup equity and can model different tax scenarios for them,” said Sunil. “For such an affordable price, I can give my employees the resources they need to make smart decisions about their options.”

Model scenarios with ease

As a founder, Sunil has to be able to communicate how potential acquisitions or exits could impact investors’ and employees’ returns. Carta’s Scenario Modeling tool, backed by data insights, enabled him to do that.

“Before scenario modeling with Carta, I used to have to put together these super complex spreadsheets to explain to people what their take-home would look like at different valuations,” said Sunil. “It was painful, and since our cap table is complex, the calculations weren’t 100% accurate.”

“Now, I can easily show how mergers and acquisitions, financing rounds, and different exit scenarios at different valuations will impact shareholders. And since it’s pulling data straight from the cap table, I know it’s accurate.”