Carta: When Your Company Tries to Cancel You

> 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.

Man what an absolute bummer of a CEO

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).

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.