@TurtleBay, above it says he had to become a limited partner in the partnership, which would seem to require him signing the partnership agreement.

The only thing I figure these people thought was, “gee, it can’t mean that, that would be a such shitty way to treat your employees that everyone would be talking about it if it meant that.”

It should not be uncommon for private companies to have buyback clauses. After all, they don’t want their shares traded widely. However, it is clear that the strike price language isn’t in the Option Agreement but rather in the Partnership Agreement. Knowing how evil HR can be, there is one copy of this document in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet that nobody has ever read. When shown an Option Agreement to sign, I bet HR laughed anyone off who asked to see the partnership agreement and told them they were being paranoid and it was all full of legal mumbo jumbo.

– Max

Or maybe the employees knew what they were signing, and trusted management not to exercise the buyback clause? Or the ones that read it didn’t take a job at Skype?

Then again, I find it astounding that companies can hire people using option packages w/o telling the people how many total shares there are in the company. This happens all the time (I have no idea if it happened at Skype), so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at the Skype mess.

One thing is for sure, I don’t see Skype being able to compete with Google in the future as no one is going to want to work for these people. Even under Microsoft ownership, these 2 ungrateful thieves will still be in charge.

It would be interesting though if Silver Lake tries to boot him out. But again Parsons doesn’t seem like a guy who lets other knock him around.

Also, in the Skype situation, the service has improved since they were acquired from eBay. Not the other way around. So it sucked for employees, but it was decent for customers.

Sad to say, but Skype just killed the romance of working for a startup and becoming wealthy when the company goes public or gets bought.

A lot of people are going to be saying, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

So the agreement had a vesting schedule, but the contract slipped in a way to basically unvest vested options for terminated employees? And the investors defend this by saying “you have to be in it to win it?” Wow.

This is fraud, plain and simple. A judge will, in a second, rule that the cultural expectation in Silicon Valley is that vested options can’t be unvested, and throw such an opaque clause out of the contract. And if there is records of Silver Lake and Skype misrepresenting the agreement, there could be criminal charges as well. I certainly hope such behavior faces criminal action, or at least ends with a terrible reputational and legal cost for Silver Lake. I know that I at least will never do business these scumbags.

Raw deals for people who worked like the devil and weren’t around for a change of control is more the rule than the exception.