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Carta is making it too difficult to cancel subscriptions, some founders say
21–30 of 82 posts
Re: Carta is making it too difficult to cancel subscriptions, some founders say
#22I don't know why anyone would willingly sign up for Carta these days. Between this and the fact they got caught sharing private cap table data, it's like they're actively being hostile to their users.
The article pretty much explains why:
> “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.
Re: Carta is making it too difficult to cancel subscriptions, some founders say
#23I don't know why anyone would willingly sign up for Carta these days. Between this and the fact they got caught sharing private cap table data, it's like they're actively being hostile to their users.
Can you provide a reference to some news articles or other details on Carta sharing private cap tables? How did this data leak?
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.
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.
Re: Carta is making it too difficult to cancel subscriptions, some founders say
#24I don't know why anyone would willingly sign up for Carta these days. Between this and the fact they got caught sharing private cap table data, it's like they're actively being hostile to their users.
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.
Re: Carta is making it too difficult to cancel subscriptions, some founders say
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are still the most mature platform. Pulley seems to be catching up and is decent, but Carta has just been around longer.
Pulley had a big layoff recently. not sure what their finances are like or how long they will be around.
Bad leadership and rudderless product. I’d avoid like the plague if I were SWE/potential client.
Re: Carta is making it too difficult to cancel subscriptions, some founders say
#26This is the sort of thing that a decent corporate lawyer ought to be able to handle. Obviously not giving legal advice to anyone's specific situation here (and I don't have a current bar card, though I am a law professor), but generally there's an implied contract law duty of good faith.[1]
Dirty tricks like writing a contract that says something like "you can cancel at the end of a term, but you have to have a meeting with us," and the contract doesn't say anything about availability of meetings... then the company only offers meeting times after an automatic renewal in order to cheat people into giving them more money... well, that smells like a really good excuse for a lawyer to argue that the duty of good faith has been breached. And even if the company is honest that they were just unable to schedule a meeting beforehand, a decent lawyer might be able to come up with enough of a theory for recovery to negotiate something fair.
[1] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/business_law/resources/bu...
Re: Carta is making it too difficult to cancel subscriptions, some founders say
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you provide a reference to some news articles or other details on Carta sharing private cap tables? How did this data leak?
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…
Thank you, this is very helpful.
Re: Carta is making it too difficult to cancel subscriptions, some founders say
#28I don't know why anyone would willingly sign up for Carta these days. Between this and the fact they got caught sharing private cap table data, it's like they're actively being hostile to their users.
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.
Re: Carta is making it too difficult to cancel subscriptions, some founders say
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually think the opposite should happen. I think currently that much too much success of a company is attributed to its leadership, which is why execs are paid so insanely disproportionately compared to everyone else. When you start saying "You have to take the blame for everything that happens in a company", it actually ends up concentrating even more wealth at the top of the pyramid. As a somewhat macabre examp…
I don't think that's the opposite? Seems like you also want the responsibility to match the power, I agree that in general it should be more evenly distributed, I want a system that can correctly capture outliers. I think that flattening would be the consequence if the power-responsibility curve became more linear, our current reality is nowhere near that. It's broken at the most baseline level where an individual st…
What happens when the employee steals $1k of wages (by slacking off or lying about sick days)? Even fewer consequences than occur when the employer fails to pay wages that are due.
Re: Carta is making it too difficult to cancel subscriptions, some founders say
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Execs should be to blame for everything a company does. That's how leadership is supposed to work. Culturally we should not be okay with someone having power without the consequent responsibility. Hopefully we see that shift.
I actually think the opposite should happen. I think currently that much too much success of a company is attributed to its leadership, which is why execs are paid so insanely disproportionately compared to everyone else. When you start saying "You have to take the blame for everything that happens in a company", it actually ends up concentrating even more wealth at the top of the pyramid. As a somewhat macabre examp…
The problem is you're not going to fix the obscene compensation scheme for the CEO position. There is no stomach for that.
So, I'm with OP. They're going to have ridiculous compensation, therefore they should have personal responsibility if something goes wrong. Justify that big paycheck and put your money where your mouth is if your want it.