31–40 of 67 posts
The later the stage investor, the less they need to worry about their reputation with anyone except their LPs.
What can a (startup) employee do to prevent these sort of situations from occurring after a liquidity event? In particular, what sort of terms should be in your hiring agreement -- eg. double trigger acceleration?
This sounds like it was explicitly to get around the trigger clauses in the contract. They likely had acceleration for change of control, and fired people before the "event" that would have triggered that acceleration.
Not that that's a perfect solution, but it should at least make these more blatant acts a bit easier to pursue in court.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Company's officers fiduciary duty is to protect interests of shareholders. Complicating contracts with the purpose of transferring that wealth from shareholders to executives could be construed as violation of that duty.
"Transferring wealth" isn't an abandonment of fiduciary duty, it's exactly what you do when you hire people and pay them . Nor is there anything wrong with negotiating contracts describing the details.
Stay classy Skype. I wish there was an alternative that matched Skype's previous good qualities (or better). The obfuscation of the OS X Skype client UI, plus the fact that they're now owned by Microsoft has cast a shadow on what used to be a great service (to me at least). Surely there is room in the market for a serious competitor.
Do any of these strike your fancy? * http://www.oovoo.com/home.aspx * http://tinychat.com/ * http://www.vbuzzer.com/conferencing/web_conferencing.php * http://www.goober.com/ * http://www.voxox.com/
Stay classy Skype. I wish there was an alternative that matched Skype's previous good qualities (or better). The obfuscation of the OS X Skype client UI, plus the fact that they're now owned by Microsoft has cast a shadow on what used to be a great service (to me at least). Surely there is room in the market for a serious competitor.
Do any of these strike your fancy? * http://www.oovoo.com/home.aspx * http://tinychat.com/ * http://www.vbuzzer.com/conferencing/web_conferencing.php * http://www.goober.com/ * http://www.voxox.com/
The later the stage investor, the less they need to worry about their reputation with anyone except their LPs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is still Skype (well, the private equity firm that owns Skype). The msft deal hasn't gone through yet.
While it is their call, and they will want to maximise profit from the sale, there's no chance that MS didn't sign off on this - think how pissed they could be. "We're buying your company and you just fired the executives that we wanted to keep running it?" I can only assume that it was decided as part of the sale negotiations. Whether it was Microsoft saying "we want to bring in a new team at the top" or the owners…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While it is their call, and they will want to maximise profit from the sale, there's no chance that MS didn't sign off on this - think how pissed they could be. "We're buying your company and you just fired the executives that we wanted to keep running it?" I can only assume that it was decided as part of the sale negotiations. Whether it was Microsoft saying "we want to bring in a new team at the top" or the owners…
There's always a chance that it wasn't part of the deal, but that Microsoft won't care. If they feel that they are buying the tech, and not the team, then they might not object to this.
Amazing that this kind of behavior by Skype/Msft wasn't calculated in the contract at the time of signing it.