Shawn Larrabee

Head of Finance

Company Bio

Founded

2016

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Carta products profiled

Fund ERP, Carta Investors Plugin for Claude

How Liquid 2 builds portfolio intelligence across eight funds and 1,100+ portcos with the Carta MCP and plugins for Claude

Liquid 2 Ventures, a San Francisco-based, multi-stage venture capital firm, wanted to discover and act on insights faster and with less friction. The firm, founded in 2016, manages eight funds and approximately 900 active portfolio companies with investment data spread across multiple platforms.

Head of Finance Shawn Larrabee uses Carta Fund ERP for Liquid 2’s financial operations, but unifying data from other platforms slowed him down. That’s why Shawn is so satisfied with the Carta Investors Plugin. Carta empowers Liquid 2 to synthesize information, surface previously hidden signals, and automate key activities to accelerate the firm’s performance.

Carta enables rapid, cross-portfolio insights for Liquid 2

When Shawn joined Liquid 2 in 2024 as the firm's first head of finance, investment data was scattered across Carta, PitchBook, Foresight, an internal database, and a CRM. Manual inconsistencies, like differently formatted company names, kept data trapped in silos, blocking Shawn from timely, cross-platform analysis.

“I couldn't match companies across systems. It felt like an impossible problem to solve until Carta provided company identifiers. It unlocked so much,” says Shawn. “I could use the Carta Investors Plugin to tag every one of our companies in my local database with a Carta identifier, a PitchBook identifier, and a Foresight identifier. Suddenly, I could bring all these systems together.”

That foundation changed the pace of discovery. Now, Shawn can analyze data from multiple sources in a single query, and insights that were structurally out of reach have become routine.

“Having the Plugin has completely transformed the way I work every day, and the advantages haven’t stopped,” says Shawn. “Every day, we continue to fine-tune the tools we've created and find richer ways to stay on top of our portfolio.”

Query-based analysis provides deep context for decisions

Before implementing the Carta MCP, quarterly reviews required data retrieval before analysis could begin. Shawn would download schedules of investments (SOI) for portfolio companies into Excel and reformat raw data manually.

For a portfolio as large as Liquid 2’s, even navigating to download the SOIs took time, but the Investors Plugin helped Shawn reduce effort, improve efficiency, and see where he needs to make decisions.

“With the Carta Investors Plugin, I simply select our funds and the quarter we want to report and I can generate the SOI and the deal IRR in one pull. At the same time, it gives me detailed metrics that guide decision-making,” says Shawn. “For example, I can see how many positions a fund has remaining and which are valued at, below, and over cost. I can filter for groups like which rounds are older than five years, including sector breakdowns by position. I immediately gain the context I need, and I don't have to navigate four different screens to get there.”

Carta helps Liquid 2 turn insights into impact

With improved infrastructure and efficiency, Shawn was ready to build tools that Liquid 2 never had before. He quickly became a power user of the Carta MCP, using Claude Code to build reconciliation tools for LP records and portco accounting.

For Liquid 2's investment team, he used Claude Code to build a Slackbot that pulls from the Carta MCP to summarize portco reports and surface companies with top-performing ARR or short cash runways.

“The tools we’ve built with the Carta MCP give Liquid 2’s investment team more real-time information with less effort. We can easily see performance outliers across hundreds of companies. It lets us shift our focus to interpreting signals, like when to follow up with founders about cash flow or when to increase our position in a high performer. The deeper visibility drives our vision.”

Carta satisfies a vision Shawn held even before joining Liquid 2. Prior to his head of finance role, he worked in fund administration and always wanted the ability to strategize across funds.

“I wished for this rich data that would help me have more capacity to innovate,” says Shawn. “I'm 10x-ing what I was doing before, but I didn't find what I wanted until I came to Liquid 2 and we started using Carta.”