Tanium is facing employee unrest and an executive exodus
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
The CEO and president were fully aware this kind of stuff was going on but looked the other way because he was producing the results they wanted to see (they weren't exactly clean either and several years later were both indicted on criminal charges).
I saw multiple people break down in tears due to the pressure he put on them. Everyone was stressed out all the time. People were constantly in poor health due to the stress. Backstabbing was normal operating procedure just to stay off the hit list. People would doing anything to suck up to the boss so they could keep their job another week, or month, or quarter hoping things would get better.
After I left the company I couldn't believe I put up with that. My health was in the toilet. Mentally I was wasted. I remember at my next job constantly worrying that everyone who was being nice to me was setting me up. I parsed every word people said to me looking for a trap. It took me a full year before I could sleep more than four hours a night.
The ones who have left or were let go are the lucky ones. The stock can't be worth the physical and emotional damage.
I've worked in a lot of high pressure jobs before that one and since then but that place will always stand out as the most damaging period in my life.
The other aspect that I think you're overlooking is that people who are wired like this are often incredibly driven people. Sure, someone on /r/entrepreneur might be willing to give up everything to pursue their dream but a sociopath is willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get what they want.
In recorded human history, exploitative actors have often been successful in business. I know you've heard about slavery before.
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!
There are other factors too. Maybe you have a unique skillset and it takes some time to find similar employment, maybe you stay for family reasons, or for a (probably misguided) sense of loyalty to the team. In my last relevant personal experience, it was obviously a hostile work environment fairly early on but I had made an informal commitment to stay on for X amount of time when I joined.
Abusive managers often actually score big wins in short order and garner favor from higher management, but inevitably we see those managers burn out the systems they build and the systems around them. Employees start bouncing out at an accelerating pace and it's a compounding effect usually because an already overtaxed team is now smaller and has to pick up the slack of the departed.
It usually ends badly.
Which of course factors back into the decision not to make a public display of an exit -- karma usually finds a way to sort these things out.
I think it's probably the case that a lot of these managers are completely oblivious to their actions. I had one manager who proudly claimed (to the team) knowledge of sneaky political tactics and posted articles on fb about Machiavelli and corporate tactics for grabbing and wielding power. It's quite an awkward thing to watch and they're usually not fooling anybody.
Being an absolutist many times can lead to you only feeling smugly superior while not really making a difference.
The bridge is already burned with the CEO, and your unlikely to burn the bridge any worse with your direct boss/coworkers by quiting immediately versus a few days/a week later. Might actually gain some respect from them which could net you a job later down the line at another firm one of your coworkers ends up at!
That being said, its all corporate politics, so it is hard to derisk it, and you should try to be aware of as much of the political situation as possible before making a move.
Edit: added last paragraph to clarify.
If you've made up your mind, you can just tell them off and walk out. You can take your sweet time and interview while you still have a paycheck and benefits. You can wait until the cliff and leave the next day. You can give two weeks notice.
It's your choice just as it's their choice.
CEO is a woman.
CEO is a woman.
Letting a bad relationship hang on is just bad for my health, I gain a ton of weight and stress!
Employees at startups generally take a below-market salary in exchange for equity compensation, so imagine the double humiliation of being fired because your first shred of equity is about to vest.
That still carries risk but not as much. Assuming you assign value to the stock at all.
Whether this particular stock will go up or down after the IPO is any-body's guess.
What does it cost to transfer stock in the US in a privately held company? Here in Europe it can be up to ~$1K to transfer stock in a GMBH or BV, other countries more or less depending on the local situation regarding notary public roles and rates. In a public company it is dirt cheap but this is prior to IPO.
That + accelerated vesting in case of wrongful termination or termination without cause can be reason enough to batch share vesting events.
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.
Those are expensive lessons, your view of humanity will likely never be quite the same afterwards. The fact that the guy crashed and burned gives me no comfort at all.
Even so, I do realize I had a part in that, if I had been a little bit smarter I could have educated myself on this stuff before accepting. And that's where the world today is different than in the past: we now have world-wide networks of people in tech that can warn each other. So every story like the one you told here should help to keep other technical people safe from predatory behavior.
I wrote about my experience here:
https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-start-up-from-hell
Apologies for the pictures not working, I still need to fix that after the latest domain shuffle.
That is so damn close to me that it was eerie reading it.
I think quite often programmers who are good but early in their careers don't value themselves enough and the relationship ends up been exploitative.
I worked 80hr weeks for just slightly under 2 years for someone I thought was a both a friend and a boss for it all to go sideways.
The lesson was learnt on the spot and while I'm still gregarious these days I operate by the maxim "trust but verify".
> I worked 80hr weeks for just slightly under 2 years for someone I thought was a both a friend and a boss for it all to go sideways.
That is really very familiar.
> The lesson was learnt on the spot and while I'm still gregarious these days I operate by the maxim "trust but verify".
Good for you. And make sure you pass the lesson on to others so they don't have to learn it the hard way.
Already did that, I worked at a place where I was the 5th programmer on the team but the most experienced and the lead, the boss was not a nice guy and worked the two youngest programmers like dogs, I soon put a stop to that with the "If you don't turn your computers off, I'm going to go flip the breaker, it's 6pm on a Friday go home".
The thing I've learnt with bosses like that is most of the time if you stand up to them they either back down, respect you for it or fire you at some point in the future (assuming you haven't already left) but in any case your life improves.
The last job I had for someone I came in at 8:30am, left at 5:30pm and outside of work I didn't answer calls, emails or issues unless I was on call, this was despite the pressure to do so that many of the other programmers succumbed to.
Team pressure is a hard thing to fight against but I've seen enough to know that a team working (actually working, not screwing around on a computer all day) 12 hour days 6 days a week can do that for a month at most and then the damage sets in and each day is less productive till you end up getting less done in 12 hours than your team would normally get done in 6.
Tired people don't do good work.
"(6) beware of people that use your love of your work to take advantage of you"
I run into this problem again and again, although I am getting a little better as I get older.
Employees who put their heart and soul to build something don't own it in capitalistic model. Only the owner by virtue of being owner of private property/company has right to it.
Treating people as means to an end, which capitalism encourages leads to this model.
I think economy dependent on human creativity will hit a ceiling, if they continue to remove ownership of content from the creators. The creators can be anything from a humble web developer or someone like your friend.
Is "confounder" a typo for "cofounder"? Too perfect. :) I've known some confounders responsible for product requirements!
It just seems like a silly thing to spend time doing, monitoring who will be vesting soon to fire them. Sure, maybe for one or two executives who are vesting integer percents of stock, but beyond that, it's not worth the time, and definitely not worth the backlash.
Scott Kupor [managing partner at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz] wrote an article [1] suggesting that a 10 year exercise window for employees who leave:
" is really a direct wealth transfer from the employees who choose to remain at the company and build future shareholder value, to former employees who are no longer contributing to building the business/ its ultimate value."
This seems to suggest that the "investment" by early employees who leave shouldn't be treated like the early investments from VC's who decline to keep investing at some point.
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.
My perception at the time was that it was a good product for what it did but maybe after the demos were over too many potential customers said "so now what?" and they were putting pressure on engineering to release way too soon. And it turns out they were probably right, even though it was an obviously useful product for live reporting, detection and triage those things aren't appealing to managers so we didn't buy it.
You piss off your lower level employees, that builds resentment and causes employee churn, and if it was a habit of the CEO the other execs would likely jump ship as fast as possible (as they've been doing).
Never ever agree to a vesting schedule where it takes longer than a year to get your stock. 1 year cliff maximum.
sadly there's plenty sucker willing to gift their work away so any hint of people having a clue about the risks in cliffed vesting become unhirable troublemakers in most startups
At the same time, there is an endless stream of young people willing to break into the industry at any costs.
The age and experience of people in a place tells you a lot about what the company really value.
Sure, I know that a few founding employees have done very well. But has anyone done very well, recently?
> 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 liquidation. They don't 'place near-absolute power in the ands of a company's creators', they're simply later to the table and have correspondingly fewer shares bought at a significant premium.
The original founders call the shots and only if they dilute to the point that outside capital holds a majority does the equation change and even then there might still be different classes of shares to deal with.
For the most part VCs are along for the ride, they can make noise and they can try to win over the board but as long as the founders have 51% or more they call the shots.
Boards are not active at the level of shareholders, though many boards do have major shareholders as board members.
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.
The suggests one of two things: Either Tanium has a really strange vesting schedule or Bloomberg blew the reporting here.
The typical vesting schedule is distributed over four years with a one year cliff. That means, with typical vesting, only <1 year old employees could possibly be on this list. Furthermore, only 25% of their grant would be at stake. With Tanium being a relatively mature $3.7B startup, we can infer that the typical grant size at this stage would not constitute more than a small fraction of a percent, even for fairly senior positions -- and we're talking 25% of that.
It thus is highly unlikely that firing right before the cliff would retain "sizable chunks of stock" big enough to materially affect the CEO's ownership. It's entirely possible that a List exists, but the stated motivation doesn't add up. Bloomberg should really follow up here with details on the vesting schedule.
If anyone has any examples of where this type of setup has actually worked out well, would love to know of one.
I feel the same way about novelty accounts.
Assuming they have no valid quotes are just silly. I think it's pretty clear why, the huge risks of retribution.
> These claims are 100% false.
hmm