Hi — Asad here. Before we jump into Peter Walker’s brilliant editorial on employee liquidity (hint: it’s improving!), we need to talk about Anthropic. They just hit $30B in annualized revenue — up from just $1B a year ago. That’s $29 new billions in just 365 days — wow! 

Two things are on my mind because of this: First, OpenAI last reported $25B in ARR back in February. They’re probably still ahead, but that gap is shrinking fast. Anthropic has been the best execution story in tech over the last year: strong product, ruthless focus on enterprise and code, relentless shipping. There’s a lesson in there for all of us.

Second, I hear 70% of new enterprise AI business is going to Anthropic right now. Everyone’s buying AI, but not everyone’s getting ROI — and I think a lot of it comes down to approach. I was a bigger believer in decentralized AI adoption than I should have been, until Kyle Norton showed me the logic of going centralized. It’s the only way to get to production-ready AI, and production-ready is where the real ROI lives. 

There’s a time in every industry when something that used to feel exotic becomes routine. The tender offer is having that exact moment.

For most of venture’s history, a tender offer was a rare event — complicated, expensive, and just a touch worrisome. If a late-stage company was letting employees sell shares before IPO, it usually meant an IPO wasn’t coming anytime soon. A seasoned executive may well worry that even this partial liquidity would be a signal to employees to leave while they could. 

Things have changed.

Tender offers executed by companies on Carta climbed back sharply from the trough of 2023. More telling than the deals is the seller count: 7,222 individual sellers participated in Q4 2025 alone, nearly matching the peak of 7,933 set in Q3 2021, at the height of the last bull market.

The primary driver is simple: Startups are staying private much longer. The companies seeing the most secondary activity today are often 8, 10, even 12 years old. In that environment, waiting for IPO liquidity becomes tricky with the standard ISO (Incentive Stock Option) expiring a decade after issuance. Not a great recipe for keeping the loyalty of your original employee set.

Yet, this isn’t just an employee story: More than half of all tender offers — 57% on average since Q1 2021 — involve at least one investor selling. In the most recent quarters, that figure has been running above 60% consistently. Investors are using these same windows to realize partial returns, especially as fund timelines stretch and LPs get impatient. A tender offer today can be as much about GP portfolio management as it is about rewarding employees.

That dual-purpose nature is actually what makes tenders so durable as an instrument. They serve multiple constituencies at once: founders, who want to retain and reward key employees; early investors, who need to show DPI to their own LPs; and employees, who’ve been told “the IPO is coming” through what feels like several distinct economic cycles.

The dollar volume tells the same story but with more conviction. After bottoming out at $3.8B in 2023, total tender offer transaction value surged to $16.5B in 2025 — nearly matching the 2021 peak. 

Tenders come in two primary flavors: stock buybacks (the company repurchasing its own shares) and third-party sales (selling to new investors). In 2025, the former exceeded the frenzy of the 2021-era wave by $1B, indicating that some management teams feel their stock is a great investment even while the employees benefit from some liquidity.

The “forever private” dynamic is only deepening this. With the IPO window still unreliable and the average time to exit continuing to stretch, boards that aren’t thinking about structured liquidity programs are going to face a quiet kind of pressure, where their best people start doing the math and decide the expected value of waiting around isn’t worth it.

Notion’s recent decision to remove the one-year vesting cliff signals something important about where this may be heading: as AI compresses time-to-value for new hires, the case for broad employee participation gets stronger. Props to Akshay and team!

But there are still real complexities. Most tender offers cap individual participation at 20% of vested shares. And not all offers are fully subscribed. What’s more, the question of whether former employees get to participate is far from settled across the industry. These are the kinds of decisions that define company culture, and they have hiring and retention implications. 

Still, the underlying direction is clear: Tender offers have graduated from “emergency liquidity event” to a part of the playbook for well-run late-stage companies. 

At least 16,538 employees participated in tender offers in 2025 — the highest figure we’ve ever seen. 

The question for every late-stage operator: Is structured liquidity part of your playbook yet, or are you still waiting for the IPO window to solve it for you?

Peter Walker runs the Insights team at Carta, where he works to make startups a little less opaque for founders, investors, and employees. Prior to Carta, he was a marketing executive for the media analytics startup PublicRelay and led a data visualization team at The Atlantic magazine. He lives in San Francisco, but you can find him on LinkedIn.

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