> “We switched from Carta to Diligent to try to reduce cost and it was a disaster. Switched back to Carta and will never leave again. It’s a 100x better product and keeps getting better,” posted Bill Smith, founder of Landing.
The 2 main issues that are discussed here actually don't seem like a big deal to me in the grand scheme of things:
1. While I think having to schedule a meeting to cancel is annoying, I think the issue in the article about not being able to have a meeting until after the renewal date seems like a pretty obvious bug to me in the sense that someone's calendar was hosed which is why cancellation meetings weren't available for so long. An f up to be sure, but this feels to me very like an unintended event that then gets amplified on Twitter/social media because the optics are so bad.
2. The cap data data issue was bad, but by all accounts Carta did an appropriate mea culpa, and in any case have gotten completely out of the "secondary market" market which was so problematic to begin with.
I don't mean to make this sound like I'm "letting them off the hook", but I'm just emphasizing that, in the business world, business leaders tend to look at things from much more of a direct cost/benefit analysis, and the pain points above just really aren't that big of a deal to most business leaders. Note that's considerably different compared to consumer products where people are much more likely to "rage quit".
And the fact is, everyone I know says Carta is excellent at their core functionality. As an employee with ISOs from multiple different companies that used Carta, I'd say that at least from the perspective of an employee equity holder that their product is very good.
Cap table data is one of those things that turns grown men into a bunch of high school gossipers. It is even more juicy information than salary data because most people know around how much money each position is paid in terms of salary. Stock ownership is a completely different story. Stock can be given to different employees at orders of magnitude differences depending on the position or stage that the employee joined at. I knew an employee who found out about another employee's stock grant amount. Once he found out, he refused to work hard at all because the other employee was "not as intelligent" or as senior as he was, yet he was granted 5x the stock because he joined earlier. It is no surprise that even outsiders of the company illegally share the data like high school gossipers.
Agreed. We deliberately avoided them and just used an old fashioned spreadsheet plus lawyers and it worked perfectly fine and wasn’t that expensive. Maybe if you’re huge but at 120 employees this still worked perfectly fine for us. I got really turned off when they started hinting they would use customer data to offer services on top. Sorry but I have no interest in sharing incredibly sensitive data like that to help possible competitors.
It leaked to other people in the company, who were looking to use that information for a secondary market product that Carta had. Since they know everyone who owns stock in company X, they know exactly who to approach about selling stock in company X on their brand-new privately held company marketplace (without the companies permission). https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/07/carta-the-cap-table-manage... for more. After this was discovered and widely reported they sold their private secondary market to another company, because it was impossible to regain trust.
hn_throwaway_99|1 year ago
> “We switched from Carta to Diligent to try to reduce cost and it was a disaster. Switched back to Carta and will never leave again. It’s a 100x better product and keeps getting better,” posted Bill Smith, founder of Landing.
The 2 main issues that are discussed here actually don't seem like a big deal to me in the grand scheme of things:
1. While I think having to schedule a meeting to cancel is annoying, I think the issue in the article about not being able to have a meeting until after the renewal date seems like a pretty obvious bug to me in the sense that someone's calendar was hosed which is why cancellation meetings weren't available for so long. An f up to be sure, but this feels to me very like an unintended event that then gets amplified on Twitter/social media because the optics are so bad.
2. The cap data data issue was bad, but by all accounts Carta did an appropriate mea culpa, and in any case have gotten completely out of the "secondary market" market which was so problematic to begin with.
I don't mean to make this sound like I'm "letting them off the hook", but I'm just emphasizing that, in the business world, business leaders tend to look at things from much more of a direct cost/benefit analysis, and the pain points above just really aren't that big of a deal to most business leaders. Note that's considerably different compared to consumer products where people are much more likely to "rage quit".
And the fact is, everyone I know says Carta is excellent at their core functionality. As an employee with ISOs from multiple different companies that used Carta, I'd say that at least from the perspective of an employee equity holder that their product is very good.
unknown|1 year ago
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bloodyplonker22|1 year ago
orionsbelt|1 year ago
itake|1 year ago
yesimahuman|1 year ago
walrus01|1 year ago
mandevil|1 year ago
They are also involved in trading lawsuits with former exec turned whistleblower for two different people. https://medium.com/@jerrytalton/when-your-company-tries-to-c... is the former CTO's take on the situation. https://levyvinick.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/COMP-for-D... is the former VP of marketing's filed lawsuit, I can't find a blog post from her.
burcs|1 year ago