Latch Lays Off 130, Promotes Lee Odess

Lol thanks. We have our own dedicated team since we publish so much. I don't know much about graphic design firms.

They and I are counting marketable securities they own as cash equivalents.

I'm not entirely clear how available that cash actually is at the current share price -- any idea?

Pretty available, per Latch's explanation:

The Company’s investments in marketable securities are classified and accounted for as available-for-sale and consist of high quality asset backedsecurities, commercial paper, corporate bonds and U.S. government agency debt securities. The Company’s marketable securities with remainingeffective maturities of 12 months or less from the balance sheet date are classified as current; otherwise, they are classified as non-current on thecondensed consolidated balance sheets.

No cryptocurrencies I imagine :)

As for Q1, they had $172 million in current marketable securities (that is maturity less than a year away) and $71 million in maturities more than a year away (though they likely could sell them quickly if they needed without much risk).

Btw, Latch also could theoretically buy back their own shares (given they are down 75%+) and this was asked on the most recent investor's call (though given Latch's structural risks that strikes me as being an imprudent tactic).

I would think “a fool and someone else’s money”

Definition of a Douche Canoe

douche ca·noenounDEROGATORY•INFORMAL

1. an obnoxious or contemptible person (typically used of a man)."I have a hard time writing about the music I'm listening to without sounding like a pretentious douche canoe"

..... according to Latch “ Odess is a proven leader in the industry with nearly 20 years of experience .... in the smart access and security space.” ...His industry experience appears to have not started until 2012

Indicative of what seems to be our culture today of embellishing each other's accomplishments and obsessive need for actualization and praise.

This is very misleading to the shareholders

Good point. That might be a case of where the obsessive need to embellish might get them in trouble.

I’m sure the board will toss around Lee’s well known brand and success history to regain the lost footing. Without a large sales force originally forecast into the growth he should be able to do this without them getting in the way.

Just ask him!

Looking forward to the follow up post in 6-12 months of his departure.

This guy got it right, sort of, but he was too optimistic.

Lee Odess Leaves Latch

Ye of little faith...

Ouch! Although, to be fair, all of the volatility has been removed from the stock price.....

I had to blow up that pic to read it...

whomever sent this email references WeWork as a comparison to Latch - in both the subject line and in comments.

beyond just being mad that they (maybe) were laid off - this person is positing that Latch doesn't even have an actual working product - a la Theranos.

For sure, the business model and its problems pre-date Lee Odess.

It strikes me that they suffered from irrational exuberance.

Lee Odess is back on LinkedIn (a month ago he said he was leaving)

Why is it that people feel the need to announce that they're leaving a platform (i.e. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc...)? They could just stop using it and/or delete their accounts. To me it's just another attempt at attention grabbing. Nobody cares if you quit using LinkedIn, if you're really fed up with it, just turn it off!

Maybe I’m just picky, but I think you meant “as passionate about delivering sales as he is about young people.”

While I’m at it, I always cringe seeing a middle aged man state they are passionate about young people.

It is funny if you look at the number of views many of his videos have. Some 20-50 views. A few have a few hundred. Pretty lame for a supposed big thought leader/industry player.

Latch is down yet again:

It's down 30%+ since this announcement. At what point do investors see this as a bargain?

Seems they were top heavy.

Important context is Evolv is now valued at $100+ million less than their cash in the bank, a very bearish sign. At the end of the last quarter, Latch reported $335 million in cash and cash equivalents yet now their market capitalization is just $218.3 million.

Of course, Latch can't be practically liquidated and they continue to burn cash (last quarter $40 million, this quarter likely less given the layoffs).

By contrast, Latch's main publicly traded competitor is SmartRent whose stock is up 25% in the past month and now valued at more than 4x of Latch, i.e., $1 billion:

Not sure if you were serious or just poking fun at LTCH, but a few things define a "penny stock". One is that it trades less than $5 USD a share. But it usually has to do that for some time period. I think LTCH broke under $5 earlier last year. At some point they'll get a warning from Nasdaq they might get de-listed and go to over the counter (OTC) pink sheets, but no real way to know when that might happen.

Another thing is liquidity issues, if the stock trades with very little volume, which makes it very difficult to trade with any reasonable assurance of real market value.

Costar Tech (CSTI), the makers of Costar surveillance products (and I believe the buyers of Arecont) currently trades at what seems an average of $5 a share (down from average of $10 a couple years ago), but their average daily volume is only a few hundred shares a day, vs. LTCH's average volume of 2 million a day. They trade on the OTC market because of that.

If LTCH announces a reverse split to try and bring the stock price back up so they don't get delisted, then you'll know they're really in trouble!

Right now they have an overall bad securities market they can try and pin the blame on. The test will be if they can recover when they market does, and if they can sustain it.

now down to 1.32:

The market is obviously in a downturn but the depth of Latch's ongoing plunge is really severe.

A professional way to exit a company regardless of how it really went. Smart person!

Those exits of “horrible management”, “poor executive decisions” etc are a personal feel good moment that will be remembered long after you delete the comment.

Can you ask him to clarify which specific nation they dominated?

"It promises to be very different than what you think"

LOL - I doubt it.

I'd bet a bitcoin that it will be exactly what I think it will be.

Lee will go down in history as The Bernie Madoff of access control.

I actually think it's a nice thing he's doing but the timing is strange since if I was him, I'd be laser locked focus on turning Latch around. He could do a history of access control a few years from now after he turns Latch into a huge success.

If I was Latch's board, I'd be confused, to say the least, about why our SVP is working on web3 and the history of access control while the stock is down 80%+ for the year.

I caught most of the Web3 presentation at Accellerise (flew in that morning and had a slight delay).

The takeaway I got from it is that there are many people in the security industry who are interested in the concepts, but nobody has any real good ideas on how/when/where to actually apply it. Most of the examples used in conversations kept gravitating towards non-security examples.

In some conversations I made an analogy to social media. Both Web3 and Social Media are really just applications on top of the broader internet infrastructure. Just because they exist doesn't mean they are likely to have any relevance to security. Using the social media example, we could have cameras publish event clips direct to a Tiktok channel or a Twitter feed, but why would you?

Security people should be aware of Web3, and understand the underlying concepts, but that does not mean there is any impending use-cases for it that are going to add value or solve problems here.

On the metaverse component, there are potentially some more viable applications, if we can solve the problems of the VR headsets being generally uncomfortable and causing nausea for a lot of wearers.

I've been hit in a layoff before - and it's clearly not fun for anyone involved. It's hard on the people being let go (obviously) but it's also hard on the folks that are left. It's hard on the customers and it essentially creates a downward spiral which can quickly pull everyone and the company down the drain with it.

I would have expected that a prominent executive would not be pushing his pet projects so publicly during such a tenuous time. Not only is it bad optics, it's bad for morale for everyone that's left.

Wake up Lee - you need to do a better job leading the troops you have left - not pandering some techno geeks who may use your product in 10 years.

Maybe Lee was one of those 100 today.

Must be "In Lee We Trust" or similar

Imagine that!

Huh!?!?! I wonder who he means?

so The Visionary has decreed that the industry has 'shifted' and the new measure of intelligence (and even ethics) is now based on how benevolent and compassionate a person is and how much love they show to others.

Lee has taken a new position as CEO according to LinkedIn!

Well, more specifically so there's no confusion, the CEO of what looks like a company he just started, and not CEO of Latch. Seems he has left Latch, since his last position has an end date and doesn't say "Current" anymore.