This week, we had Carta CEO Henry Ward on to chat through the early-stage market with us. 

Alex had a grip of data and a sheaf of questions, so here's what we got into:

• The current state of the early-stage venture capital market: From Ward's perspective, the early-stage market is in better shape than many folks think. It's the later-stages of venture capital that are the most moribund. We also riffed on the quality of startups that are raising today, and how much pain is coming for young tech companies that can't quite attract more capital.
• Carta's new Seed and Series A product: Carta is offering a mostly-automated method of closing early-stage rounds; we wanted to better understand the economics of the effort, and what the unicorn hopes to achieve from the work.
• We closed with a look ahead, and a series of fun closing questions with Ward.

That's just the high-level summary. We also discussed entrepreneurship more broadly, the importance of LLCs, and even how to construct a podcast interview.

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Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.