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.