> 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 so

> 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... which would help Hindawi defend his ownership by limiting the number of stakeholders... 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.