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- 🍪 Carta abandons cart
🍪 Carta abandons cart
Happy Thursday, friends. This is Bite Sized Beta. We’re like a free speed dating service for everything you need to know in tech: fast, fun, and to the point.
That’s right, this entertainment is all pro bono, folks!
Now let’s get to the good stuff:
In the oven this week:
🛒 Carta gets into hot water
🍪 Cookie crumbs: 5 bite-sized headlines
💬 Tweet of the week: super companies
🍫 Chocolate chips: our 3 favorite finds this week
😂 Snickerdoodles: Thursday memery
FRESHLY BAKED
CARTA ABANDONS CART
There’s always that one friend that’s sayin’ one thing and doin’ another. The one that might be kinda sketch but you don’t wanna ask because you don’t wanna know?
Well this week, some startups got a nice backstabbing from their former friend: Carta.
If Mean Girls were real life, Carta might just be Regina George.
If you don’t know, Carta started out as a way for startups to track and manage their equity pool.
A friend to the younguns, ya might say.
Over the years, it’s been slowly offering more services, like monthly appraisals of the fair market value of private company stock ("409A-as-a-service") and VC portfolio analytics.
But this week, one of their bets backfired when a startup CEO tweeted:
This might be the end of @cartainc as the trusted platform for startups.
As a founder it feels kind shitty that Carta, who I trust to manage our cap table, is now doing cold outreach to our angel investors about selling Linear shares to their buyers.
— Karri Saarinen (@karrisaarinen)
Jan 5, 2024
Apparently, the guy they tried to contact was a family member whose investment was never even made public.
Huh.
But since Carta manages their equity pool, they know:
- Who has shares, how many share they have, and the price they got it at
- What other transactions have happened and when
- Legal/compliance info
- Headcount, revenue & other information where provided
Sooo somehowww, they managed to dig up the guy’s contact info and pitch him on selling his equity (there’s a sweet 2% transaction fee on the line after all).
Ya know what they say, these hoes ain't loyal.
At this point, Carta’s CEO apologized and insisted it was an isolated incident where an employee violated internal procedures, and offered to hop on a call to discuss the ordeal.
Great, conflict resolved, right?
Definitely not.
It ended up devolving into a back and forth Twitter battle between the two CEOs, where Linear’s CEO then claimed that this has been happening for years based on his convos with other founders and investors.
72 hours later, Carta’s CEO announced that they’re now exiting the secondary trading business.
And from the looks of the devastation on X, it looks like their credibility took a big hit.
Brutal.
But guess that’s what happens when you go low to try to make a quick buck.
BITE SIZED HEADLINES
OpenAI launched its store for GPTs called The GPT Store. What kinda GPTs are available at launch? A trail recommender from AllTrails, a code tutor from Khan Academy, and a content designer from Canva. You’ve gotta be a premium subscriber for access, so we’ll try it out and let ya know if it’s worth the hype.
Apple's Vision Pro is shipping on Feb 2, with pre-orders starting January 19th. All you need is $3.5K, or 583 Starbucks caramel macchiatos! Should we get one to sell in 20 years? 🤔
The price of Bitcoin spiked after the SEC tweeted that it was granting approval for Bitcoin ETFs to be listed on securities exchanges. The only problem? It wasn't the SEC tweeting.. it was a hacker. Then yesterday, the SEC actually did properly approve it. 😂
OpenAI is now paying to license news articles to train its models on. How much are they forking up? Only $1-5M per deal apparently, which is low even for small publishers. It’ll be interesting to follow which publishers bite.
According to 43 experts (MDs, dietitians, and epidemiologists), the mediterranean diet is healthiest - linked to a lower risk of all-cause mortality, heart disease, stroke, hypertension, and other diseases.
THE BIG PIZOOKIE
TWEET OF THE WEEK
When interest rates go to zero, everything gets funded, diffusing talented employees. When rates rise, mediocre ideas and companies go bankrupt, talent is recycled and reallocated, coalescing into incredible innovation.
Exponentially true in era of tech breakthroughs and war.— Michael Eisenberg (@mikeeisenberg)
Dec 26, 2023
Never thought about this correlation before, but it’s pretty fascinating to think about what happens when talent consolidates. 👀 Game on.
CHOCOLATE CHIPS
OUR FAVORITE FINDS
34 lessons about life learned the hard way. Lots of thought provoking ones, but some cheeky ones too, like: getting punched in the face once permanently reduces your fear of it happening again.
Fred Wilson (legendary VC) released his predictions for 2024, and it’s pretty optimistic.
SNICKERDOODLES
THURSDAY MEMES
😂
That's all we got for ya this week, folks. See ya next Thursday!
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