Carta Carry
Moving the Venture Capital back office from the desktop to the pocket. As the sole designer, I owned the mobile experience from first concept through launch, partnering with product and engineering to prioritize the workflows GPs needed away from their desks. 0→1 in four months · 4.9★ app.
Overview
Running a venture fund means moving money, chasing approvals, and keeping investors in the loop. Until recently, all of it required sitting at a desk. Carta Carry is what we built so it doesn't have to.
GPs are the people running the fund: making investment decisions, approving transfers, keeping everything moving. I led design from 0 to 1, and the goal was simple to say and harder to do: Make Carry the place GPs actually go to run their fund, not a mobile version of the desktop site they tolerate. First concept to a product GPs ran their funds on, in four months.
Where it started
Carta's desktop product is powerful and dense. The ask was simple in theory: bring the most important parts of it to mobile. The harder question was which parts, and what "mobile" even means for someone managing a fund between airport gates and board meetings.
We started small. Notifications. Task approvals. A quick view of what needs attention today.
The design challenge
Fund admin isn't complicated the way a chess game is complicated. It's complicated the way moving house is complicated. Lots of pieces, lots of people, strict deadlines, real money on the line. The job was to make the most time-sensitive parts feel effortless on a six inch screen, without flattening the complexity or hiding the information people actually need to make decisions.
What it grew into
Over time, Carta Carry became the place GPs go to handle the mechanics of their fund: reviewing who's contributed to a capital call, approving wire transfers, tracking distributions to investors, keeping an eye on how their portfolio is performing.
Each release added something. But the through-line stayed the same: make the complex stuff feel manageable, and make sure the right action is never more than a few taps away.
What I learned
Designing for high-stakes decisions on mobile means earning trust at every step. People aren't going to approve a $1M wire on their phone if the interface feels uncertain. The visual language, the copy, the confirmation flows, all of it had to feel solid. The product got better when I stopped thinking about “mobile” as a constraint and started thinking about it as a different kind of focus.