🍪 Carta abandons cart

Happy Thursday, friends. This is Bite Sized Beta. We’re like a free speed dating service for everything you need to know in tech: fast, fun, and to the point.

That’s right, this entertainment is all pro bono, folks!

Now let’s get to the good stuff: 

In the oven this week:

  • 🛒 Carta gets into hot water 

  • 🍪 Cookie crumbs: 5 bite-sized headlines 

  • 💬 Tweet of the week: super companies 

  • 🍫 Chocolate chips: our 3 favorite finds this week

  • 😂 Snickerdoodles: Thursday memery

FRESHLY BAKED

CARTA ABANDONS CART

There’s always that one friend that’s sayin’ one thing and doin’ another. The one that might be kinda sketch but you don’t wanna ask because you don’t wanna know?

Well this week, some startups got a nice backstabbing from their former friend: Carta.

If Mean Girls were real life, Carta might just be Regina George.

If you don’t know, Carta started out as a way for startups to track and manage their equity pool.

A friend to the younguns, ya might say.

Over the years, it’s been slowly offering more services, like monthly appraisals of the fair market value of private company stock ("409A-as-a-service") and VC portfolio analytics. 

But this week, one of their bets backfired when a startup CEO tweeted:

Apparently, the guy they tried to contact was a family member whose investment was never even made public. 

Huh.

But since Carta manages their equity pool, they know: 

- Who has shares, how many share they have, and the price they got it at 

- What other transactions have happened and when

- Legal/compliance info

- Headcount, revenue & other information where provided

Sooo somehowww, they managed to dig up the guy’s contact info and pitch him on selling his equity (there’s a sweet 2% transaction fee on the line after all).

Ya know what they say, these hoes ain't loyal.

At this point, Carta’s CEO apologized and insisted it was an isolated incident where an employee violated internal procedures, and offered to hop on a call to discuss the ordeal.

Great, conflict resolved, right?

Definitely not. 

It ended up devolving into a back and forth Twitter battle between the two CEOs, where Linear’s CEO then claimed that this has been happening for years based on his convos with other founders and investors. 

72 hours later, Carta’s CEO announced that they’re now exiting the secondary trading business. 

And from the looks of the devastation on X, it looks like their credibility took a big hit.  

Brutal. 

But guess that’s what happens when you go low to try to make a quick buck.

BITE SIZED HEADLINES

OpenAI launched its store for GPTs called The GPT Store. What kinda GPTs are available at launch? A trail recommender from AllTrails, a code tutor from Khan Academy, and a content designer from Canva. You’ve gotta be a premium subscriber for access, so we’ll try it out and let ya know if it’s worth the hype. 

Apple's Vision Pro is shipping on Feb 2, with pre-orders starting January 19th. All you need is $3.5K, or 583 Starbucks caramel macchiatos! Should we get one to sell in 20 years? 🤔

OpenAI is now paying to license news articles to train its models on. How much are they forking up? Only $1-5M per deal apparently, which is low even for small publishers. It’ll be interesting to follow which publishers bite. 

According to 43 experts (MDs, dietitians, and epidemiologists), the mediterranean diet is healthiest - linked to a lower risk of all-cause mortality, heart disease, stroke, hypertension, and other diseases.

THE BIG PIZOOKIE

TWEET OF THE WEEK

Never thought about this correlation before, but it’s pretty fascinating to think about what happens when talent consolidates. 👀 Game on.

CHOCOLATE CHIPS

OUR FAVORITE FINDS

SNICKERDOODLES

THURSDAY MEMES

 😂 

 

That's all we got for ya this week, folks. See ya next Thursday!

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