Linear CEO alleges Carta mishandled sensitive cap table data

Don't forget how poorly he handled the harassment claims last year.

This is now a pattern.

I think you refer to this response? https://x.com/henrysward/status/1743794996732735679

Discussed here: Carta CEO's response to the unsolicited outreach to their customers' investors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38897363 - Jan 2024 (77 comments)

But is this really true? In my experience, it's been less of a "come to Jesus" moment and more a slow process of hiring experienced folks who understand the appropriate privacy/security posture for a growing company.

Edit: I'm yet to experience (or see) it as a public breach of trust, especially when the company already has thousands of employees.

* they’re not just using that private information to nag you. They appear to be abusing their access to confidential information to price it for the buyers too.

One of my unofficial roles as technical cofounder was to bring some ethics regarding customer data and privacy. If I could build the software in a way that (ab)using PII or otherwise private data unnecessarily was difficult, even better. Business types understand when things are too expensive to build ;)

Not saying business folks never have good ethics regarding that stuff, but I find engineers are often more opinionated about it.

Is there anything the SEC could intervene with on that particular allegation - I mean, it's more-or-less insider trading right?

I went with Pulley after a Carta sales rep called me out of the blue, on a number they must have scraped (or bought from someone who scraped) from an SEC filing, ignoring the do-not-call registry.

Their last raise was $500m at a $7.4B valuation.

Using a 10x rule of thumb, that implies they make $740m/year, or the vc believes they will grow into making that.

I can't understand it either.

As this drama prominently shows: Carts is tying it's darndest not to be just a "cap table company"

There’s examples going back years to when they released the third party sales product, CartaX.

Funnily there were internsl signs that there were problems with this product before it launched:

“Andrea Walne, Carta's head of liquidity solutions, was pushed out after she raised concerns about regulatory compliance [of CartaX].” - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/30/business/carta-workers-in...

Does your country have a thriving startup scene like the United States?

This is probably why your country does not have a thriving startup ecosystem. SV runs on naive young 'uns who believe the "you own 0.5% of the company" bullshit.

Let's do it and call it Cartb

I would not trust the open source community with this private data. the potential for abuse is too distributed without practical access controls.

You could just use a spreadsheet. The reason I pay for cap table management software is that it’s the easiest way to get a 409(a) valuation, which is something pretty much every US startup needs annually and open source couldn’t replace.

(I looked at getting a 409(a) valuation separately and the best prices were more than cap table software that bundled one.)

spreadsheets