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The Salary Benchmark Fight Hiding In Your Cap Table
Pave and Carta both promise to tell you what to pay people. The real question is whose paychecks are in the sample - and the two tools answer it very differently.
The Fund That Bet Its Whole Pitch on the People, Not the Money
Four operators who never quit their day jobs built a venture fund where the check is the smallest thing in the room. The real asset is a rolodex of 100+ people who have already done the job.
Dave Hendricks
Dave Hendricks is the co-founder and CEO of Vertalo, an Austin-based platform that acts as an SEC-registered transfer agent and tokenization engine for real-world assets. He has spent close to a decade building infrastructure to turn illiquid private securities into compliant, transferable digital assets. A serial entrepreneur, he previously co-founded LiveIntent, the programmatic email advertising platform, and helped build CheetahMail into the world's largest email service provider before its 2004 sale to Experian. Earlier he ran the worldwide relationship between Arthur Andersen and Oracle and worked on large securitization projects. He is known for a pragmatic, institution-focused view of crypto and a habit of dismissing hype cycles in favor of durable financial plumbing.
Vertalo
Vertalo is an Austin-based fintech that operates an SEC-registered digital transfer agent and tokenization platform connecting the digital asset ecosystem. Since 2018 it has helped issuers, fund managers, broker-dealers and custodians move private securities on-chain - handling digital cap tables, investor onboarding, compliance and settlement across multiple blockchains. More recently it has pivoted toward 'agentic' infrastructure, exposing its regulated transfer-agency operations through APIs and an MCP server so AI agents can issue, record and transfer securities.
Graham McConnell
Graham McConnell is the CEO and co-founder of Nth Round, a Philadelphia fintech that helps private companies, family enterprises and funds manage equity, run investor portals, distribute reports and create shareholder liquidity. A Dartmouth cognitive science graduate who oversaw software at the $25B quant firm AJO Partners before launching the company with his father in 2018, he is a self-described saver and Bogle-style passive investor on a mission to simplify and democratize private investing.
Henry Ward
Henry Ward is the co-founder and CEO of Carta, the San Francisco company that started life in 2012 as eShares with a single, stubborn idea: paper stock certificates should be digital. A decade later, his platform tracks ownership for tens of thousands of private companies, thousands of funds, and well over a million equity holders.
Pulley
Pulley is an equity and token management platform that helps founders, finance teams, and employees run cap tables, fundraises, valuations, and tax-compliant token distributions from one place - without spreadsheets or paralegal time.
Mayowa Ajayi
Mayowa Ajayi is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) on the Capital Network team, focused on consumer, AI apps, and speedrun companies. He brings over 15 years of investment banking experience - most recently as Managing Director at Guggenheim Partners and eight years at Barclays in the Global Technology, Media, and Telecommunications group - to the firm's effort to identify and support the next generation of high-growth startups. Since joining a16z in December 2024, he has become a key figure in the a16z speedrun accelerator program and an educator on startup finance fundamentals, translating Wall Street rigor into founder-friendly insights.