One reason could be because HN is more familiar with Coinbase's mistakes (not getting into the NFT scene earlier and letting OpenSea/MetaMask beat them to the punch, being a crypto company in the first place which ideological quibbles aside is seen as extravagantly unsustainable and thus doomed to fail).

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.

"HN is more familiar with Coinbase's mistakes (not getting into the NFT scene earlier and letting OpenSea/MetaMask beat them to the punch..."

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.

NFTs were a short fad (did it even last a year?), but CB being the market leader for crypto wallets meant they should’ve had an NFT feature ready far earlier. This is a “performance” critique of them getting big and complacent and unable to execute while nimbler startups ran circles around them.

How is jumping on every fad a good thing? Focusing on their core business and not getting distracted by small month-long fads happening in their general industry sounds a lot more sensible.

It was a very lucrative fad, and as per that other thread, it sounds like Coinbase bought into it anyway by increasing headcount to build an NFT offering anyway, just after they were late to the party. If that’s accurate, then lose-lose.

How lucrative could it have been when the one major player (OpenSea) was slashing staff as early as July 2022?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2022/07/15/nft-marketpla...

That's a fair rebuttal, and I will admit that my recollection of last year is filtered through the very strange time compression of the COVID WFH era, and the extent of my perception of this was "What's an NFT? Is that something you can manage with Coinbase? There's another app now?" From an extremely layman view, it just seemed natural that the leading crypto app would support NFTs. But I'm not the only one to voice the opinion that it seemed like Coinbase had missed the NFT wave.

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.

One key difference is that the Coinbase message said "accountability rests with me as the CEO". If you claim to take accountability, but there are no actual consequences, it's just the CEO grandstanding. Doesn't seem surprising that this specific bit would get called out.

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.

The CEO is accountable. But they are not going to fire themselves, are they? The board decides that.

No, but a CEO can slash his own pay to reflect the current situation. For example, when the WiiU was a flop, Nintendo's CEO personally decided to take a paycut of about 50%[0]

I believe this should be the standard for any CEO who wants to say they take accountability.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-25941070

What would you say these "consequences" are that you expect to happen?

Just because someone is responsible for something doesn't mean they need to be punished.

Sure. But if you won’t take any pain don’t go around with that holier than thou attitude talking about how you take full responsibility.

It sounds like a definitional issue of what responsibility is. What "pain" should they "take"? And why?

My point is not that they should take “pain”. My point is that they shouldn’t go around talking about “taking full responsibility” when there is no negative consequence for them. I guess it’s just an emotional / cultural norm.

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.

What I'm trying to drive at is whether there is any satisfactory way for a CEO in this position to "take responsibility for their actions" without raising your ire. What would they have to do? Then we can look at whether that's a reasonable thing to expect of someone in such a position.

My initial instinct is that this line of argument is more like venting than it is any kind of real suggestion for behavior change.

Of course they aren't going to actually suffer any consequences. We all know that's not how this works, which is exactly why it's so risible. But something reasonable and totally under their own control is to not brag about holding themselves accountable when they know nothing will happen.

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.

Yes. It’s when (some) CEOs try to use this as just another brand building opportunity that it draws my ire.

How is saying "accountability rests with me as the CEO" different from saying that they're the one who made the decision? Is that really dressing it up? Or just saying the same thing with different words? It really seems like you have a different definition of "accountability" than other people.

I think it’s you how’s confused about the words involved here. For example you switch between the concepts “take responsibility” and “be accountable” as if they were the same thing. They’re not.

The dictionary definition of "accountable" is this: "required or expected to justify actions or decisions; responsible"

Hackernews has a problem with crypto. Just see any thread related to crypto for the completely one sided and biased view most users on this site have. They will willfully ignore all valid and good uses cases for it so they can feel smart and self righteous when they see it crash…

> Hackernews has a problem with crypto.

No, most reasonable adults have a problem with crypto.

Still waiting to hear one of these valid and good uses cases for a publicly distributed ledger. One of these days I’ll hear one, but I haven’t yet. Circumventing oppressive regimes seems to be the only thing I’ve heard of that vaguely sounds like a value proposition.

That you don't see one just means that you don't see one and by shouting down anyone else who disagrees, as the HN hivemind has in every crypto thread I've seen to date, doesn't mean one exists, it just means that in this community a valid and good use case may as well not exist. People, including me, have tried to explain, many times, the valid use cases but HN at large disagrees and has made that distaste clear. That's fine but you'll forgive us for giving up. Those you disagree with aren't idiots, they just have a different perspective and don't see it as useless.

I'd love to have a meaningful conversation. I'd love to hear a novel idea. You have to forgive me for being a little jaded though when I continually ask to hear a use case and I continually don't get use cases.

"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.

At risk of sounding like I'm patronizing you, which I'm not, that ship has sailed. If you'd like to view arguments by people with a more balanced view of crypto, there are a ton of threads you can find on the topic with the help of Algolia. Maybe when the HN majority finds a way to interact with us that isn't awful, people like me will be willing to engage in discussion again.

This has come up so often that I have listed some interesting real world examples of Bitcoin usage here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095

These all appear to be the same use case of "to transfer money, outside the control of governments".

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.

> could have been made with any "thing"

"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"?

Gold. Shells. Anything that people have used as money over the years.

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.

"That's it" fails to capture the fact that said tech still has a collective market cap of $984B[1], after it has had precipitous drop in value over the last 12 months. Maybe, a distributed ledger for digital goods is a massively valuable tool for humanity?

[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/

Thank you for this list.

Okay, I'll bite. What are the valid and good uses of it?

What's the advantage in burning the entire power consumption of Zaire for a month, just to pay for a tin of beans?

Seeing the comment under your very reasonable take is "One of the best comments on HN ever. Thank you!"

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 mean yeah - brand equity matters, and the CEO and how they behave is just about the most visible manifestation of your brand

This is a pretty disengeous response, it's clear I'm not saying it's because it's Coinbase or Coinbase's CEO.

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).

-

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.

The simple banal answer is probably people know more about Coinbase than they do about Lattice.

Again, this really isn't about Coinbase.

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.

Speaking for myself, I am less familiar with Lattice than any of those brands except for the last one

Those other threads had CEO bootlicker comments too. It's absurd. None of these CEOs are actually taking responsibility, it's all just lipservice.

Thank you for this.

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.