Downgrading Skype and Silver Lake to ‘Evil’
wired.com
wired.com
Just another of example of how this story is being spun in the tech media. Skype is not a Silicon Valley company in any meaningful sense. Most of their development team is in Estonia and their headquarters is in Luxemburg.
Also San Jose has called itself in the past "the capitol of Silicon Valley".
Perhaps they felt Silicon Valley was a SF bay area mindset rather than a specific geographic location.
I'm not sure how you can say developing in a county adjacent to silicon valley is the same thing as developing in a country more than 3000 miles away.
If Silicon Valley is a metaphor then the term is meaningless. New York is Silicon Valley. So is Chicago. So is Vancover, and London.
If it isn't---because of the unique legal structure, cultural consciousness, and developer concentration in and around Silicon Valley---then its unfair to say that a Luxumburg company operating under EU rules is a silicon valley company.
Frankly it would seem that analysis of the stock vesting expectations of hackers in Tallinn is more relevant to the story and the structure of the Silverlake partner agreement than the expectations of Silicon Valley programmers when it comes to attracting and retaining technical talent at Skype and among the people mentioned in the techpress, it has been difficult to find any in key technical roles.
Stock vesting expectations of hackers in Tallinn is not any different than in any other part of the world.
When I was a kid, San Jose was the "gateway to Silicon Valley" which basically was anywhere in Santa Clara county (at that time, mostly the 415 area code).
What's odd though is that:
1. The repost on Wired makes no mention that it's not a new article by the author. I find it typical to see "This was previously seen in Blabla".
2. The title went from "Upgrading" to "Downgrading", which made me think it was in response to the first post.
This is actually pretty clear even to me ( and I merely have an interest in law as opposed to having legal training ) and should be manifestly obvious to a real lawyer. He should have had a lawyer read his employment contract and then should have discussed it again before he decided to leave Skype.
Even the part you quote is unclear; the clause which makes the Ordinary Shares 'subject to repurchase' is conditioned on the leading "If... the Ordinary Shares... are to be repurchased" clause. That may imply some other trigger or prior notification is necessary first, before the Management Partnership Agreement repurchase-at-cost (which would be contrary to the usual meaning of 'vesting') comes into play.
At this point any definitive interpretation – without the text of all agreements between Lee and Skype, and professional familiarity with the terms and precedents involved – is premature judgement.
[1] edit addition: I see in a BusinessWeek article that Lee did sign but did not carefully review the 'Management Partnership Agreement'. That's a screwup, but the interplay between the exact language of all the agreements could still give him daylight.
I don't really see how that's ambiguous... I mean, I think Skype and their investors have behaved like total assholes, but the guy did sign a contract which explicitly told him what would happen.