This email is basically:
Oh dear we're in a tight spot, no idea how we got here, it's a mystery! I guess someone (definitely not me!) ran the business in a way that demonstrated an appalling understanding of our market, our customers, and the macro climate, and a fundamental carelessness with investor money and employee livelihoods. Don't worry though, that person was definitely not me, so I'm the right person to lead us out of this.
p.s. look shiny severance packages!!!
p.p.s. Once again, that person was not me, so there shouldn't be any consequences for me, other than a bunch of easily impressed tech workers giving me praise for the severance package.
I suspect the overall CEO compensation package for a company the size and structure of Lattice is trivial compared to other expenses.
I mean, are we certain of that? Maybe someone should try it first.
Don’t discount the value it could have with the people still there. You might call it pointless, but for the remaining people at the company, it could signal that the CEO is also will to make personal sacrifices for the company.
From a pure numbers perspective, I agree, it would be a pointless gesture. But symbolically, it could help with the morale of the people who are staying.
I’m not sure it would help, but it shouldn’t be discounted so quickly.
A VC backed CEO is usually paid a lower salary than the average software developer. Their biggest pay is by owning a lot of equity that's on a standard vesting schedule. Cutting their salary would be entirely performative. And clawing back equity is difficult and only matters is the company does well.
A public company CEO is usually not the founder. They're compensated with stock bonuses (that can be almost immediately liquidated) based on performance, as well as a large salary.
I think forgoing a bonus when you're the CEO and doing layoffs would be great. Unfortunately, that goes against the interest of the CEO and investors
"We have to lay 15% of you off, but don't worry, we can still find $100K's all over to speculatively invest in startups"...
[1] https://www.kron4.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2022/11/tw...
"While our revenue has grown by five times since the start of the pandemic, our costs have grown by even more as we geared up for a continued rate of growth that now looks unlikely. Additionally, so much of our organization was built for a paradigm of rapid growth, in terms of the roles, ratios, and structures we’ve put in place."
...but nowhere does he talk about why these things happened.
He literally uses the passive voice top avoid taking responsibility ("our organization was built" not "I built").
You come away with the feeling this is a good letter in which he takes responsibility because he distracts you by spending the rest of the letter describing the details of the severance offer, which is completely orthogonal to the issue of root causes and responsibility.
I'm really curious how this specific press release is different than the Coinbase one [0] (or most of the others on the homepage this week), where the HN crowd was demanding that the CEO "take accountability" and resign, or reduce CEO pay, etc etc
To be honest, this press release reads basically the same as 10+ other tech layoff press releases I've read this week. Including nearly identical severance packages.
Lattice is in a more mainstream ("useful") industry and its CEO doesn't have a record of courting controversy, so it gets more sympathy. It doesn't come with the downsides of being a ubiquitous brand or association with a controversial sector. Plus it's a smaller company so it's more of an underdog. Also the startup funding offer is neat and intriguing.
lol, who the heck thinks that not getting into NFT market was a mistake? If anything, they did themselves a favor by not building many NFT capabilities.
NFTs might have a second chance in the future but currently is just a mass graveyard of scams.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2022/07/15/nft-marketpla...
I'm not a fan of big companies xeroxing each other's features, as it seems to be a dominant form of product "innovation" these days, but one could have assumed that Coinbase, being market leader in this space, would have done that for NFTs.
And on the note of it being an extremely short fad- it is interesting that on occasion, the big tech incumbents might actually beat the upstart errant. Clubhouse seems pretty stagnant now, but Twitter Spaces seems to have had more vitality, even if it's just leaning on that site's massive social network as well as some free publicity from the current CEO's public drama. Of course, the NFT market exists independently of what any one company.
This message did not make such obviously false claims of accountability. Is that enough of a difference to make up the entire difference in the entire tenor of the conversation? I don't know. But it is at least the reason for your specific example.
I believe this should be the standard for any CEO who wants to say they take accountability.
Just because someone is responsible for something doesn't mean they need to be punished.
E.g. if somebody is committed of a crime and says “I take full responsibility for my actions” to the judge just before being sentenced, then that is a very strong signal of character for me.
But if somebody says “I take full responsibility for my actions” just before jumping in an Uber to go to a luxury dinner with the board of directors, then that does not impress me and I perceive it as a cheap attempt to reap the social benefits of saying that phrase with none of the potential costs.
My initial instinct is that this line of argument is more like venting than it is any kind of real suggestion for behavior change.
It's basically making the layoff about themselves, rather than the poor sods who just lost their jobs. (There's some other common patterns in that vein too, e.g. "this is the hardest decision I've ever had to do".)
If you want to acknowledge being at fault, that's totally fine. Just write the facts. The over-hiring was a mistake, and you're the one who made that decision. Don't dress it up into a personal journey of failure and redemption.
No, most reasonable adults have a problem with crypto.
"Some places are so terrible that the only external financial systems unregulated enough to allow them to participate are these specific unregulated financial markets" is some net good being produced in end for the citizens of those regimes, and circumstantially the "block chain did that" I guess, but that still doesn't tell me why you needed a block chain to be involved to begin with.
The problem with that is, these transactions are now on an immutable ledger (which is the actual use case of block chains).
These transactions could have been made with any "thing" that enough people agree has some value.
"any" is going a lot of heavy lifting there.
Apart from people agreeing on value, that thing also has to be: 1. out of their governments' control (all the examples had governments gone bad), 2. easy to transfer/carry, 3. durable.
Can you please name a few alternatives if you think that's a simple problem?
Bitcoin fits the bill for those aspects. Can you name a few other "things"?
I do not disagree that blockchain tech has a good use case. It's just that it does one thing: a distributed ledger. That's it.
What's the advantage in burning the entire power consumption of Zaire for a month, just to pay for a tin of beans?
I'd say the saccharin sweet tone in this comment section is mostly born of personal feelings. If the Coinbase CEO was a more integral, well-liked part of the SV founder scene, the same exact letter would have been just fine for most of these people.
I'm saying it's because it's the literal individual "Jack Altman", outside of his capacity as a CEO, has personally rubbed elbows with the right crowd.
Lattice had 700+ employees working on a product that HN would normally lampoon for having even 100 working on, they were massively bloated and there is literally no chance the organization wasn't aware that they were hiring people who wouldn't add enough value to weather any sort of mild storm (and they all but say that in the letter).
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They did so because it shows growth, and they put company growth above even the slightest bit resiliency because that's the playbook. Show growth at all costs because you can just fire those people and write a cutesy letter and a severance package with... some of the money that showing growth let you raise!
It's a crappy thing founders often do, but again, if you sling tweets with the right crowd and hang with the right people, all is forgiven.
Essentially the CEO gets to behave badly, as long as the person is well liked. That's not how a meritocracy based on anything like "brand equity" should work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33895773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34268762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33961410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809631
Every single time it's the same template, every single time the CEO is the villain, until we got one that was part of the in crowd.
I think people forget how tight knit the SV crowd can be. A lot of these people are former class mates/team mates/etc. It's a softer version of nepotism where any failings are taken much softer because these are people who just might rub your back the right way down the line due to proximity.
The job of the C-suite is accurate forecasting which is why they make 400x what the line worker does in large companies. Obviously they don't have a crystal ball but if scaled up the company hugely during a black swan event like covid and assumed that was the new normal I'd be personally ashamed and would either resign or give back my salary for a year+ to keep most of those employees and find a function for them. Perhaps via retraining, perhaps with instituting optional pay cuts to let people work 4 days a week, etc.
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ECONOMIES require tech, regardless of industry, thus a growth in tech - even when there is a plateau in general economic growth....
They still need tech to advance, and adopting that advancement to remain competitive?
Or am I wrong?
What's happening in tech and the economy in general might new for some of you, or the first time in your working career that you're worried about your job because, for the past 15 years or so, tech has been largely insulated from other small cycles which have happened. Economies have downturns and cycles, and in your lifetime you'll see it many times.
My parents struggled so much in the 80s to put me through school. My dad had to take a job in a different state and live away for 6 months just so we could keep our house and the lights on. I will never forget that time. Or 2001 when so many dot coms busted, as did my first job. Or in 2008 when half my colleagues in finance were walked out the door. Or 2011's mini recession.
It gets better, and this all will pass. To me, it certainly makes a difference how people treat each other when times are tough, and I can find no fault of this CEO or company. Nor of Zuckerburg when I read and listened to his message and felt, to me, genuine sadness in having to make such a decision.
It's tough times - let's all avoid cynicism and see if we can help anyone we know impacted by a job loss by our networks. Go write up a referral for someone on LinkedIn. Call a friend who's struggling and just listen to them. That's all you can really do.