There's nothing wrong with such an agreement (as you describe KL), and though this type of explicit inventive plan is not so common in Silicon Valley, it is sur

There's nothing wrong with such an agreement (as you describe KL), and though this type of explicit inventive plan is not so common in Silicon Valley, it is surely valid, ethical, and and useful wherever it arises. (To be more complete, in Silicon Valley there is usually such an incentive plan concerning liquidity events, but it's tacit and is anyway orthogonal to stock/option grants.) But you say it explained to everyone at KL "clearly" what was going on. Don't you see that this is one complaint here is that not only wasn't this done, but perhaps the very opposite? And were you given detailed instructions on how (and how quickly) you must exercise vested options if you quit, even though this had no meaning at all whatsoever? If the answer is no, please imagine it was yes. Would you have still been totally confident that you understood the mechanism (wouldn't you have wondered: why are they explaining something that is in practice irrelevant?)