Carta: When Your Company Tries to Cancel You | Hacker News Reader

Carta: When Your Company Tries to Cancel You

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120 pointsSirLJ42 comments

This needs to be said more often, and should be at the core of ethics courses:

“What is the point of accruing influence and money and prestige if you won’t use them to help people? Stop saying “this isn’t my job; there’s nothing I can do; I don’t want to know; it didn’t happen to me; it’s none of my business.” Mankind is your business. The common welfare is your business. The dealings of your trade are but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of your business.”

I think the point for such leaders, unconscious though it may be, is to feel safe. There's something they're hoping never to have to experience or feel ever again, and this is what they're doing to keep that from happening.

It's only ever going to be a temporary solution, but the parts of the person's psyche that are driving these decisions are probably pretty stuck in a difficult time when they felt powerless against the same sort of thing they're trying to avoid today, and they react from that immaturity.

I'm armchair psychologizing, but I think the behavior of people who seek power for reasons other than to help people makes more sense if we realize they're not making decisions from a mature, adult part of their experience.

Perhaps ethics classes should be replaced with counselling sessions so people can value their demons. Maybe C-suite execs and corporate board members should have mandatory hours of monthly therapy in order to have the power they wield.

You and GP might find the Dark Triad interesting:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad

(Therapy and counseling won't change such personality traits)

From the original blog post:

> I had joined as a Director with a single direct report, been promoted three times in two years to Chief Technology Officer, and then led engineering through a period of unprecedented growth to a team more than 400 strong.

Carta had a 400 person engineering team?

I know they raised a lot of money, but this seems like a lot of engineers for what I thought they did. Maybe they were exploring a lot more functionality than I’m familiar with.

Maybe they have a lot of microservices.

I'm baffled by this figure as well. I've had a couple of jobs at startups that used Carta to manage employee options and the only thing they seemed to do was to send out an email every quarter saying "congratulation you now have this many options vested." They also seemed to have a blog they referenced in some of the emails. So I found the following passage somewhat grandiose:

>"And Carta’s platform had such potential to do good: arming workers with the tools to navigate thorny and unfamiliar tax laws, guiding companies to ensure equal and equitable pay, helping families create and preserve generational wealth."

My impression was that they were kind of the ultimate SV ZIRP creation - a startup that managed other startups (probably) mostly worthless options.

> for what I thought they did

At one point Ward was talking about taking out the global banks. Carta raised too much money and then didn’t know what to do with it.

I mean, the best thing to do if you've raised too much money is not spend it, but apparently this is not a common approach.

When I read that they'd closed a Series G, I laughed because that's definitely the farthest down the alphabet I've seen anybody go, and it made me wonder if there's even a theoretical limit to where it might stop.

I suppose the theoretical limit would be Z.

Just do what Excel does and wrap around to Series AA, Series AB...

They were hiring people for positions related to automating fund management recently. I'm sure they're trying to add a lot of new stuff.

Caveat: I had a _very_ brief stint there.

My take was that — like many companies — it takes more people than you expect to untangle a Python 2.7 monolith. They also seemed to move somewhat slow and steady by design.

This CEO sounds atrocious. One thing I’ve experienced recently is that boards tend to have warped incentives to keep backing their CEOs even if objectively they’re not good CEOs.

> Ward’s reaction to the scandal was all too familiar: first, attempting to downplay the concerns; then, publicly attacking the person reporting them; then, rushing out a “thought leadership” puff piece that raised more questions than it answered; before finally pulling a 180 and announcing that the company would exit the liquidity business entirely…without ever explaining what had actually gone wrong, or how Carta would change its operating procedures moving forward.

This was frighteningly familiar to read. I grew up the child of a gaslighting narcissist father and this is textbook:

1. Downplay or deny the concerns. Accuse the person pushing back of overreacting. Insist on speaking directly yo the accuser. Do not do this in writing. Deniability is paramount.

2. Attack the person. Shake their own faith in themselves if you can, but at least discredit them to anyone else who might find out about their complaint. Any perceived weakness is fair game.

3. Go on at length defending yourself, as publicly as possible. Ignore the fact that you make no sense. Sense-making is not your job. Volume is.

4. If you still have not won, overreact in the extreme. Misconstrue every conversation. Take full advantage of your earlier refusal to commit anything to writing. Use this to emphasize your original downplaying of the issue. Further discredit the person by making it seem as though this were not just the appropriate response to their complaint, but the only response possible.

5. Never, ever, under any circumstances, explain your overreaction.

I can smell this pattern from a mile away. It's incredibly hard not to become defensive against it and reply from your own agitation.

The only way to win is not to play. Do not engage the narcissist directly. There is no rationality there. You absolutely cannot win at their game. Under no circumstance should you agree to communicate in a way that is not recorded, but better yet, do not communicate at all.

Respond only to inquiries by sane people. Your refusal to engage the narcissist on their terms will make them hopping mad. Let them be mad. Sane people will see it. Even then, respond only in recorded ways.

No good comes from a leader like this.

I’m fortunate not to know any really serious narcissists (I think), so maybe this makes no sense, but it’s interesting to me that 1, 2, and 3 in your list seem to roughly correspond to the first three stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining)

It does seem a bit like a fight against what might otherwise become the death of their self-image.

The difference between it and actual grief seems to be that the unwanted outcome is not inevitable here. Sometimes this works.

Hopefully we can make it less and less likely to work over time by raising awareness of the tactic.

You're on to something, for sure. The general outline of behaviors reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO

> And it’s hard to believe Carta’s response to my board letter of October 2022 — trying desperately to signal my worry that the company’s leadership was breaking the law and putting the business at risk — would be to hire a forensic firm to recover a copy of my personal Apple iMessage history and publish private messages with enthusiastically-consenting sexual and romantic partners that had nothing whatsoever to do with the company…and then use those messages as a pretext to falsely accuse me of harassment and discrimination

emphasis on "enthusiastic". i get what Dr. Talton was going for here but it made me laugh that he had to put his partners' enthusiasm on the record (and the not so funny side: it is extremely f'ed up that Carta put his private affairs into public record in the first place. i'm not looking it up and i feel sorry for Dr. Talton.)

> When I finally decided that — as a fiduciary — I had no choice but to write to Carta’s board, I hoped that my record of accomplishment and my commitment to the company would ensure I was taken seriously.... And if I, a 40-year-old 6’2” cis white guy in the C-suite with a Stanford PhD, couldn’t speak up, who could?

amen. very well written and it seems the case is building against Carta's CEO.

Here’s the text:

If last week's shit-show was not the end of @cartainc , this definitely is

* the sales representative who whipped his dick out at a company event, and was promoted a few weeks later.

* you read the texts one manager sent to her Mom about an executive touching her under the table at a work dinner, let alone her claims that she was subsequently “admonished for ‘having her legs out’” and fired after she escalated to HR.

* the Head of Corporate Compliance was fired a week after she learned that the People Team had been instructed to stop logging complaints in the company’s whistleblower platform.

* When the company claims it fired another female executive in part for “taking unauthorized leave,” after she reported to the Chief People Officer that the CEO’s gaslighting and abuse had shaken her so much she needed a day to collect herself…

* CEO who has turned over no fewer than eleven C-suite executives in five years — and settled at least three discrimination cases in the last year alone

I have no idea whether any of that is true. If it’s not, Carta should sue the hell out them for libel. If it is, wow…

I highly doubt a guy getting sued by his former company would be stupid enough to post publicly things that he cannot demonstrate to be true (the truth being an absolute defence to libel).

That’s a compelling argument, and if I had to form an opinion today, that’s probably what I’d go with.

On the other hand, people said recklessly idiotic stuff all the time. Some guy in the news today is in court to determine now much he owes a woman who successfully sued him, and he still kept saying wild stuff about her.

Certain people seem pathologically incapable of STFU. The person who wrote the comments we're discussing could be one of them for all I know.

But this guy was silent for over a year. If you look at his Twitter, he didn’t tweet, didn’t like tweets, just went dark for over a year. He didn’t speak to the media while his company tried to ruin him. I think he knows exactly when to speak up and shut up.

In the article, each of those items has a link to further supporting info.

In the original, none of those are cited as his personal observation- all of them are based on (with links to) publicly available news reports on the company, published by reputable news organizations like Business Insider, who presumably have at least a reasonable due-diligence process before they publish, or at least one could make reliance on their having done so.

Basically, I know where I'd put my money on whether they happened, and who ends up looking bad.

What is a chief people officer?

Head of HR

At some point in the last decade or so HR at many tech companies have decided to rebrand themselves at "People Operations." And CPO as a title is the logical conclusion of this nonsense. You guessed the acronym correctly. Practically speaking it's the same old mundane HR department. They may use "Hey" in their email salutations or promote "Wellness" programs now but their primary purpose is still to protect the interests of the company not the employee.

I mean honestly "people operations", while not a good term, is still a much better term than "human resources". Always wondered who came up with that one, and whether they intended it to be used in real life, or just in dystopian sci-fi.

Sounds like a terrible CEO. Do I smell an Adam Neumann exit opportunity for the CEO?

Sounds like a terrible board as well. Not surprised to see Andreesen amongst them.

Ah, Adam Neumann, the man who really wasted the time of thousands of Google using Hi-Fi enthusiasts.

What’s the go-to alternative? I’ve heard of Shareworks [1], but their sign-up process is nonsense.

[1] https://www.morganstanley.com/atwork/cap-table-management

Pulley https://pulley.com/

Ah, I'd seen them put on a second tier due to the crypto affiliation. But that looks like it's only marketing now.

If anyone avoided them due to that, reconsider.

I'm a Pulley customer for our startup - it's great, relatively straightforward and no hassle. Also much cheaper than Carta with less overhead

If I hadn't seen this sort of "leadership" up close and personal, I would probably think this post was wildly exaggerated if not mostly made up.

Man what an absolute bummer of a CEO

I love that he name drops Herodotus. One of my favorite books!

Sounds like a clown show all around, standard for the golden age of fraud.

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