Corporations  Early Access 

Carta now supports performance awards with variable payouts

What’s New: Here are the highlights for Carta’s updated performance award module.

• Manage performance awards from a single, unified modal
• Support variable payouts
• Streamline award management with updated UX
• Updates to vesting modals for admins and participants
• (Coming soon) Custom vesting schedules with performance conditions
• (Coming soon) Milestone vesting with performance conditions

Manage performance awards from a single module

Carta’s new performance award functionality allows administrators to manage performance criteria and payout from a single module. Performance criteria can be created and applied to multiple vesting schedules and many grants at once. Awards sharing the same performance criteria are all managed from a payout perspective from a single action:

Support variable payouts

Carta now supports variable payouts for performance awards. Performance awards can be configured to allow for payouts at greater than or less than 100% of target. 

Note: Carta will initially reserve shares from the plan’s share pool at the maximum payout amount.

Streamline award management with updated UX

Performance conditions can now be created and tied to vesting tranches:

Performance conditions now can have both variable (pay out at greater than or less than 100%) or non variable payouts. Performance conditions can be attached to multiple vesting schedules; achievement is governed by managing the condition itself and flows back to all affected tranches for vesting:

The performance condition(s) are then tied to a vesting schedule or individual vesting tranches:

Associating grants with a performance vesting schedule will allow administrators to manage condition achievement by evaluating the condition itself. Performance tranches on the award will not pay out until the related performance criteria are achieved: 

Updates to vesting modal for admins and participants

Prior to achievement of a performance condition, the vesting modal will show no shares vested for tranches tied to performance conditions. The progress table will indicate the performance condition that is tied to each tranche, and will show the potential amount that can be earned. 

Following the evaluation of the condition, tranches that have met both the time and performance conditions will show as vested and will allow exercise (if options) or release (if RSUs). The following screenshot shows the condition “Liquidity Event” as achieved on 9/16/2020, allowing the tranches that have met both the time and performance based conditions to vest: 

Coming soon

While this initial release covers performance awards and standard vesting templates, we will soon release additional functionality. This includes the ability to associate performance conditions with custom vesting templates and schedules, as well as combining performance conditions with milestone vesting events. An upcoming entry will cover these items.