Carta lays off 10% of the workforce

-- tc article confusing - https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/10/carta-previously-sued-for-... --

I think it basically means they can’t answer visa related questions so anything they can’t answer gets punted to this consult.

It’s a consideration that they’ll have lots of questions that would have been “I don’t know, go find an attorney.” So now it’s “we paid this attorney to answer you up to 30 minutes.”

Visa holders are extra hosed during layoffs, but there’s not really any way to avoid this as you can’t favor visa holders to not be laid off.

I know lawyers can be verbose but surely it takes less than 30 minutes to say “you’re fucked”

better than nothing, in my opinion. At least they were considered.

Seriously? Look at their other severance benefits.

Besides if you need an attorney for an immigration case it would be a massive amount of hours. The 30 minutes consultation is helpful to decide if you need to pursue a case.

I can't believe with all they are giving you still had to shit on it somehow.

I don’t know about the rest of Europe, but here’s how it usually plays out in Sweden: 1. Company needs to save money. 2. Company decides to shut branch office X and cancel project Y. 3. Company now has more employees than it has positions. 4. Employees get reshuffled across remaining positions according to complex rules (but basically last-in-first-out). 5. Employees that end up being "left over" are laid off. So the official reason is not "lack of money", but "lack of work". I’ve seen it happen several times, and ended up on both sides of the rope, so to speak. It’s a matter of Following The Procedures, but that’s all there is to it.

I can only speak to the UK who remain a European (if not EU) country. My understanding having been through it in my first job, is in the UK you must make a given number of a specific role redundant. So it's not the people you're laying off but instead you say, we're making cuts to 4 sales positions. There is then a required consultation period where the people to be laid off are identified so there's always forewarning that cuts are happening but not to who.

So it's not firing but it's still perfectly possible to reduce headcount. What you can't do is the standard US move of firing everyone with zero notice by email.

I think there's a legal difference between laying off employees "in bulk" by shutting down teams/divisions versus firing individual employees .

> (and no, saving costs is not a justified reason)

This is incorrect. Every jurisdiction allows for laying people off to reduce costs. This is the primary thing a business is supposed to do -- hire when there is more work and fire when there is less work.

The only requirements in the EU are notification periods and filing the appropriate paperwork for mass layoffs -- known euphemistically as "collective redundancies". See here: https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/human-resources/employ...

Moreover European companies lay people off all the time during downturns as does everyone else.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/12/23/mkez-d23.html

How is saving costs not a justifiable reason? Maybe all of this is why European employees have such a hard time finding US salaries.

How can "we don't have the money to pay you" not be a justified reason?

If the company cannot afford the post, then you're made redundant. So yes you can quite easily get rid of people to save costs.

I have been involved (from a Senior management perspective) in one significant layoff that affected US and UK employees. How we did it in that case is we took legal advice about what was the minimum requirement, and then leveled-up/adjusted from there to try to be as generous as we could. Layoffs are certainly possible even within the framework of EU labour law, but employees have more rights and depending on how big you are there may be additional requirements (eg in large companies in continental Europe I believe labour representatives have to be involved in the planning of the layoff etc).

The exact specifics of the deal in our case were a little different for US and UK folks because of things like how healthcare works in the US being so completely awful so you have to figure out things like COBRA which would just not be a thing in Europe. That forced us to adjust things to make it equitable/equivalent for both US and UK folks, but we really tried our best to be fair to everyone.

While the base requirements are much higher in the UK/Europe than in the US if you have teams in both places, you should do whatever you can to offer broadly the same deal to both teams. Besides your basic duty as a human to be fair to people, note that your remaining employees will judge you based on how you treated their departing colleagues.

According to this, there can be economic justifications for layoffs in France. But it looks like there is a mandatory severance of 12 months.

https://www.safeguardglobal.com/resources/blog/terminating-a...

I was about to ask the same thing. Why would someone leave voluntarily for worse benefits?

Provided that you had a business plan behind the layoff and you keep only employees whom you deem necessary for that business plan. Why would you want them to leave?

Been at the company 3 years, this guy Manu was there in the early days, but he is pretty much a ghost since the past 7 years. He's moved on, I think he is a VC now.

Is there a way to view linkedin profiles without logging in?

I could be wrong but carta should have much better margins than the two you mentioned so it should be closer to traditional 7-10x saas multiplier. Sometimes there are tender offers for rsus but usually you have to wait for trigger event, I don’t think RSUs are worse than say NSOs

Most RSUs are double trigger and don't trigger taxes till an actual liquidity event

where are you getting the rev figure?

Who said Carta was performing poorly? A more apt analogy is that the franchise's budget just got slashed by 10%, so now they need to rearrange the talent budget... This happens all the time in sports teams too.

They fired and sued the CEO, which means they should probably have noticed something before having to fire 10% of the company.

Elon disagrees

Legally if you are on payroll but not doing work the visa issue remains. Now will the government actually enforce that who knows. I’m not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.

If you are still on the payroll, the company is committed to paying you, which means they don't get to recognize (accounting-wise) the cost savings of letting you go. They could convert you to a temporary FTE, but that doesn't help your visa. Severance and other costs of letting people go are recognized as soon as the employee walks out the door.

You sound entitled tbh.

I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop for a decade.