People

'I wrestled with what I considered hypocrisy at Carta daily'

Emily Kramer, former VP of marketing for the $3 billion startup, accuses the company of gender discrimination, retaliation and wrongful termination.

A woman in shadow at the top of a staircase

Emily Kramer, former VP of marketing for Carta, says she was excluded from executive meetings and denied promotions to an all-male C-suite "over her style."

Photo: izusek/Getty Images

Compensation and equity software startup Carta had been one of the leading voices around gender equity in tech after its 2018 study showed that for every dollar in equity a male employee holds, women hold just 47 cents. In a blog post, its CEO Henry Ward pledged to do better and hire a woman to its board.

But the woman who led that study sued Carta on Tuesday. Emily Kramer, former VP of marketing for the the $3 billion startup, accuses the company of gender discrimination, retaliation and wrongful termination.

  • Her complaint alleges that an internal study completed in 2018 showed that Kramer had been massively underpaid. Her salary was ultimately raised by $50,000 and her equity package nearly tripled, but she says she was denied when she asked for her pay and equity fix to be applied retroactively.
  • She claims to have objected to a slide in a pitch deck that included the word slavery and showed a picture of medieval serfs, saying it was "highly offensive." It remained in the pitch deck, despite her complaints to HR and Ward.
  • Her lawsuit also described being excluded from executive meetings and being denied promotions to an all-male C-suite "over her style." Despite the public promise to hire a female board member by the end of 2018, Ward has still not hired one to this day, the lawsuit claims.
  • In a one-on-one meeting last November, she alleged that Ward said she was "in violation of a 'no assholes' policy," that he repeatedly called her an asshole, and that he compared her to an alcoholic who needed to acknowledge she had a problem. She also claims that Ward said she had been given many passes because she is a woman.

Carta declined to comment on the lawsuit or make Ward available for an interview.

Another former employee wrote a post in support of Kramer that criticized Ward's leadership style, but it was later deleted.

Despite having spent two years trying to address gender equity and diversity and inclusion inside the company, Kramer said she felt like she was forced to resign after the conversation with Ward.

  • The cognitive dissonance between her company's external actions and what was happening internally was "sad and hurtful," she said. She tried leading internal change, like asking to diversify hiring panels, but said she was rebuffed.
  • "I spoke up and tried to do so with a direct style but also not too frequently, and I tried to do it in an appropriate way. And, as I allege in my suit, I was retaliated against," she said.

Still, she believes in Carta's mission of closing the gender equity gap, and her advice to any company struggling with diversity and inclusion is to start by evaluating pay.

  • "In general, I think inclusion starts with compensation," she told Protocol. "No matter what's happening, if you look over to the person next to you that's doing the exact same job — or maybe you're doing a more senior job — and you find out that your pay isn't the same, everything else that the company is doing for inclusion gets thrown out the window. So it needs to start there."
Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins