41–50 of 93 posts
I'm getting sick of reports like this. Setting up unfair vesting schedules and firing people before their stock vests... somebody should vigorously investigate it and put the CEO in jail. Startups are fucking hard work and a CEO stealing glory is a crime not a culture issue. These guys need fear of God.
I went through a long drawn out sales engagement with them. It seemed like a cool product at its core (basically a sort of meshed set of interconnected nodes that you could do live "natural language" queries against predefined collected data (i.e. "what machines are running ntpd?") but the stuff they were trying to sell on top of it at the time like patch management ranged from half finished to promises for future re…
So... osquery?
Whoever thought that calling 'Orions List' 'Schindlers List' was clever has no idea what Schindlers List was all about. > The situation at Tanium underscores the risk of venture capitalists placing near-absolute power in the hands of a company’s creators. That sentence does not make sense to me. It is a rule rather than an exception that VCs end up with minority shareholdings but usually favorable terms in case of li…
To me the parallel with Schindler's list is pretty obvious. He was a nazi that put Jews names in a list for industrial workers to save them from concentration camps. In this case we have a Jew that put workers in a list to steal their money. For sure is not a good taste joke, but I can see the point.
> One of the most unnerving aspects of life at Tanium is what's known internally as Orion's List . The CEO allegedly kept a close eye on which employees would soon be eligible to take sizable chunks of stock. For those he could stand to do without, Hindawi ordered the workers to be fired before they were able to acquire the shares, according to current and former employees. Employees at startups generally take a belo…
Makes you wonder whether there's anything, at all, this company's management is competent at. I guess CEO (the founder's son) didn't go through the usual hiring process.
I can't imagine how the founders thought that firing tens of key employees in order to retain an extra fraction of a percentage point made financial sense.
> One of the most unnerving aspects of life at Tanium is what's known internally as Orion's List . The CEO allegedly kept a close eye on which employees would soon be eligible to take sizable chunks of stock. For those he could stand to do without, Hindawi ordered the workers to be fired before they were able to acquire the shares, according to current and former employees. Employees at startups generally take a belo…
So he was getting less than half of his MNC salary at this drone startup. He was totally immersed in making and breaking things with weekends stopping to exist for him and evenings and nights blurring. For pretty much 10 months.
He was asked to resign a day after demo day where potential investors raved about the product his team (3 people) had finished. Another team mate was also asked to leave within a week. Both of them were given a reason on the lines "excellent engineer but won't be a good fit in the culture and your product was not well appreciated". Only remaining team mate was a confounder who used to pass on requirements. Of course both ex employed didn't get anything. He said he needed at least 2 more months to get some stocks as he would get instalments after every completed year.
He took a break of around two months. Relaxing, slowly getting back to rhythm. Him being good and being from IITB meant he had literally hundreds of recruiter mails every week. But he calmly deleted any mail which had startup mentioned anywhere in it.
Sometimes back his previous manager recruited him back at the same European MNC with a substantial pay raise.
My point of writing isn't sharing a generic burnt by a startup anecdote with you. He tries to remain calm but I, and many other friends, can see that he has been deeply scarred by the deception and (I would call it) betrayal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did I miss the part of this story where they said they had nonstandard vesting? The industry standard is 4 year vesting, month by month, with a 1-year cliff. The traditional horror story is employees being fired just before they cliff.
No, I just think GGP is mis-interpreting the situation because of the article's unfortunate wording. Once the stock is vested it stays vested. Whether it is 'worth something' or not doesn't matter, if you've got it it stays unless you sell it. I suspect 'worth something' translates into 'something for which there is an easy market', merely whether or not you can easily sell it. Whether this particular stock will go u…
> One of the most unnerving aspects of life at Tanium is what's known internally as Orion's List . The CEO allegedly kept a close eye on which employees would soon be eligible to take sizable chunks of stock. For those he could stand to do without, Hindawi ordered the workers to be fired before they were able to acquire the shares, according to current and former employees. Employees at startups generally take a belo…
Wait, so besides the culture of fear and abuse as detailed in the article, they also can't ship product? Makes you wonder whether there's anything, at all, this company's management is competent at. I guess CEO (the founder's son) didn't go through the usual hiring process.
There are bad reasons to quit a company and good ones, but there are few better ways to make an exit than on the spot when the CEO of your company personally and publicly berates a low-level employee in front of the team.
Correct. If you tolerate, if you blindly allow, if you accept without action - you implicitly endorse. I remember a time 10 years ago when a flight attendant harassed a person behind me unfairly. I regret not standing up for that person. Don't be a bystander - do the right thing!
Being an absolutist many times can lead to you only feeling smugly superior while not really making a difference.
Where is the evidence? Where are the quotes by previous employees making this claim? These employees were fired because they were failing to do their job. If you are running a company will sit aside and do nothing and continue to let anyone stay in the company that proved to miss their target repetitively? These claims are 100% false. This story is not only poorly written but it is full of false information crafted o…