In support of the true owners at Carta

This has been a difficult month for those of us affiliated with Carta and for fans who have been rooting for them based on the company’s aspirations. Carta has publicly painted a picture of its dedication to a mission of creating more owners in a given business, in an equitable way.

Sadly, for those of us with firsthand knowledge of what happens within the walls of the organization, we know this not to be true, and it hurts more knowing it directly impacts the employees responsible for building with that goal in mind. I’m proud and appreciative of my former colleague, Emily Kramer, who filed a lawsuit against Carta regarding gender discrimination, retaliation, and wrongful termination.

Though many of the details in the lawsuit are representative of intimate discussions between Emily and the other members of Carta’s executive team, I don’t doubt the validity of her statements, which are devastating and all too commonly shared in hindsight by employees at tech companies that we continue to read and hear about.

Emily’s recollections highlight a recurring theme that plays out in the ranks at Carta: which at times included an element of discrimination, a disturbing cabal of yes-men (who were referred to as “Henry’s soldiers”), and thus a culture of omerta. While this toxic culture affected everyone and was constantly excused by Henry’s eccentric leadership style, it takes a special toll on women and other marginalized identities who are already fighting an uphill battle for respect and equity. Emily wasn’t alone in her pursuits to propel the company forward as a leader incentivized by the underlying goal of enhancing Carta’s reach to a global customer base centered around the value proposition of equity in ownership.

A parallel story
I was recruited by Carta to evangelize and spearhead a new business unit currently known as CartaX. Early in a series of aggressive recruiting interactions, it was made clear to me that CartaX would be the company’s biggest bet to date (later I would come to think of this as Henry’s “white whale”). While that product has still yet to launch, this spring it already started generating anticipatory press coverage. CartaX ultimately hopes to be a venue for the trading of private company shares.

As someone who has spent her entire career focused on enabling liquidity for private company shareholders in the form of stock trading, I was excited to take responsibility for leading the growth and scale of CartaX. Similar to Emily’s experience, there were many rewarding moments during my tenure. But as I started to dig into my primary initiatives, the cracks began to form.

On many occasions I was told by Henry that I was the most intelligent and passionate person, (with the caveat of “only after him”) regarding private-company stock trading. When presenting plans for the initial product launch (which I was building with only a skunk works team until the initiative received a budget following the next fundraise), I always felt the feedback I’d receive from Henry was dismissive towards my way of thinking; it came across to me as incredibly patronizing. I had spent years working in the field, both as an entrepreneur and an expert in private markets at Nasdaq and believed my merits as an expert were what led to my role within the company. It seemed as though Henry would only validate my ideas if they were further supported by one of my male counterparts on the team. At times, I felt so defeated that I would intentionally ask said male team members, all of whom had no prior experience or knowledge working in the secondary market to present my ideas as their own to Henry, just to see his reaction. To no surprise, those ideas turned into initiatives that were incredibly well-received by Henry and thus widely accepted as core to CartaX’s strategy. Notably, one such individual was promptly given many of my responsibilities within a week of my eventual departure.

In the meantime, I felt as though another outlet for supporting CartaX that would also get Henry on my side without me constantly feeling as though I had to defend my background would be to form an advisory board of external individuals with domain expertise or perspectives complimentary to my own. Strategic advisory boards are commonplace in companies as a way to leverage expert input to support an initiative. In hindsight, it’s ridiculous to think that I had to position this as a way to justify my own seat at the table.

Henry supported the idea, and as I met with the potential candidates over the course of months, I learned that Henry had been going behind my back to hire one of the male advisory-board candidates. Though I had advocated for an attempt to hire this individual, I strongly voiced that I felt it was best for the company to contemplate this in the future once CartaX was in a position to bring on someone with his background, which was wildly different than the scope of experience I had presented as part of a hiring plan that had been accepted at the executive level. Even worse was that the candidate — who held more general experience than my focused expertise that Carta had so impassionately sought during recruitment — was given a title and compensation package that was well above my own.

My discontent with the dynamics related to CartaX became increasingly more evident when the company began raising money based on the future possibilities of the business.

• I was encouraged to join investor pitch meetings, with emphasis on investors I had deep relationships with in my own network who cared about private company liquidity; several of which then invested in Carta as a result of the meetings. I quickly realized that I wasn’t meant to be there to contribute to the conversation, but instead to smile, nod and just go along with the narrative. As I sat in these meetings, I would bite my tongue as the investors were being presented the future of CartaX on a timeline that I strongly believed was incredibly too aggressive by way of compliance and especially technical infrastructure restraints. To this day I believe that once Carta launches CartaX they will only quietly support their own equity trading yet brand it as a widely-distributed product offering as a way to say they’re eating their own dog food while learning from mistakes and appeasing the investors they made promises to.
• At this point I had started alerting members of Carta’s legal team about my concerns not only about the timelines but about promises around deliverables related to CartaX that were now compliance-related in nature, which I thought could lead the company to trouble with regulators down the round, even in retrospect.
• In the weeks to follow I was arbitrarily and abruptly told that my own performance was suddenly not up to par, and that if anyone were to blame for the promises made, it was me. In response, I asked to receive an audit trail of how that could possibly be true, and I was never given one. On the flip-side and in parallel with developing the CartaX go-to-market strategy and business planning, the skunk works team I had assembled (which I appreciate so much so for their dedication and passion to the project) had been generating millions of dollars of transaction volume in a premature version of CartaX and was on track to exceed forecast.
• My final in-person interaction with Henry involved him abruptly and bizarrely disputing the concept of an Indication of Interest as “being a real thing” in the context of securities trading (to be clear — it’s very real) during a management meeting I was leading. At this point the targeted belittling could be explained, in my opinion and at least partially, due to his contempt for those he felt were in a weaker position than him.
• I thought the last straw would be when we lost Carta’s longest-tenured enterprise customer. I believe this was largely due to Henry’s incessant insertion of his scattered opinion on the mechanics of how the customer’s stock should trade in the secondary market ahead of their impending public offering. I also spoke to the customer in an attempt to amend the situation. When the final decision was made by them to part ways, I voiced my concerns once again to the legal team, which fell on deaf ears.
• Incredibly, though, it wasn’t. The final blow came when I was presented with a revised and much-lower compensation plan that was portrayed as beneficial to me “because the visibility of leading CartaX would be a boon to my overall career.” I knew then that it was going to be my last week at Carta.

My role and responsibility coming into Carta was to ensure the success of a product and initiative that reimagined corporate ownership for the private markets. I was hired to bring expertise and acumen to our business unit and go-to-market strategy. Instead, I felt as though I was sidelined and used to convince the outside world we were living up to the brand Emily Kramer had been a part of building.

Henry showed time and time again that his opinions are over-indexed on intuition instead of being in balance with data-driven insights and experience from professionals. It has been made clear that in lieu of high quality products the priority within the company is to push initiatives based on Henry’s hopes and dreams of how the world should work versus the realities of what customers deserve and expect.

To this day, I still don’t believe Henry understands or really cares to acknowledge how stock — public or private — trades; if he does, I never got the sense that he regarded anyone’s concerns or advice on the matter. In the rare instances he did regard internal experts’ recommendations on these issues, the deference almost always seemed to go to men. This was made worse by the tendency, I’ve observed, in fintech, to seem to completely disregard the very real regulatory considerations that are impactful to customers.

I know that Carta’s employees truly want to feel like owners; I was one of them. What’s best for the company’s future is a diverse and inclusive leadership framework that doesn’t penalize expertise or the vocalization of ethical concerns and the right to be surrounded by fairness and equity in the workplace. I look forward to a day where Carta truly emulates its mission for both customers and those at the company who tirelessly work to see it through.

Connect with me via email or on Twitter.

Disclaimer: The views, information, or opinions expressed in this article, blog, or post are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the official position of Manhattan Venture Holdings, its partners, affiliated business, and its employees.