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I must be misunderstanding what he is saying, but I can't figure out what. Once his shares have vested, they are his. What entity forced him to sell his shares
by nevon 1y ago
I must be misunderstanding what he is saying, but I can't figure out what. Once his shares have vested, they are his. What entity forced him to sell his shares for 1% of what they are worth and how could they possibly do that?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- fragmede 1y agoWhichever entity ended up buying Windsurf, the corporation. They get to declare the exchange rate, and for what. Sometimes it's cash, sometimes it's stock, usually it's some mix of both.
- conartist6 1y agoCognition made him a lightning offer it sounds like, valid one day only. I think if I understand what he is saying he could either stick with the product and team giving up the shares, or keep the shares and try his luck getting money for them another way. I appreciate that his choice shows that he is in it for the product and the team, but also ouch.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- shawabawa3 1y agoGoogle did a weird thing where they poached windsurf employees, licensed their tech and hired the CEO and upper management, leaving a shelled out company behind Looks like employees were given an exploding offer to join Google and sacrifice windsurf shares at a low valuation, or stick with windsurf If you stuck with windsurf you then joined cognition in a later acquisition
- nocoiner 1y agoWow. How did the Windsurf investors feel about that?
- lokar 1y agoThey got paid out as well. Meta pulled the same thing recently. So, a new trend where big tech “buys out” a startup in a way that only early VCs, founders and top managers get any value.
- sarchertech 1y agoSeems like that makes options completely useless. If they had actual shares they could at least sue because majority shareholders have a duty not to completely screw over the minority.
- lokar 1y agoIt has always been possible (and sometimes happens) for VCs and mgmt to screw the early employees. The question is will it become more common now? Also, people equate these to aquihire deals. But they are not really. Most aquihire deals are when the company is out of runway, or it seems growth has slowed/stopped and there are no good ways out. There is not mucH value left. Here there is clearly billions in value, it’s just not being distributed in the normal way.
- sarchertech 1y agoIt feels like it will become more common if Google gets away with this with no real backlash. I mean why would anyone honor employee options when buying out a company if you can just poach all the key employees and assets. As you said there was so much money involved. I can’t think of a similar situation where employees were screwed out of billions like this.
- bigmadshoe 1y agoVested options can be voided when you leave a company, unless you want to exercise them.
- wmf 1y agoIt's not entirely clear, but I think Google/DeepMind offered him 1% of (what he thought) the shares were worth and then he refused and then the shares became worth almost nothing because Windsurf was just a husk of its former self.