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Good for Kleiner. It seems their reputation was being dragged through the mud on a merit-less case of "she said they said". No factual evidence was presented ju

Good for Kleiner. It seems their reputation was being dragged through the mud on a merit-less case of "she said they said". No factual evidence was presented justifying Pao's viewpoints. Before you downvote, please provide factual evidence and I will gladly update this comment.

jegutman 12y ago
There were performance reviews that said she did well, they were mixed and complicated like all performance reviews. Also given that the defense tried to discredit her by noting that she sent e-mails to herself it seems strange to call "she said they said" invalid evidence since without those e-mails there would be nothing at all. What would hard evidence even be for this type of case? Is there going to be an e-mail between partners saying "we should not promote Ellen because she's a woman"? Did Ellen Pao prove her case conclusively? I think not. Was it clear that there were plenty of issues going on at the time that Kleiner could've handled a lot better? I think so.
- zxcvvcxz 12y ago
  Even perfect performance reviews doesn't entitle one to be promoted. Why does everyone have this idea in their head, that if they cross all the t's and dot all the i's the world is going to reward them? Are we really going to start to sue over disillusionment?
  - tw04 12y ago
    When a woman who has perfect reviews is passed over for a promotion by a man who doesn't... ya, they have some room to be pissed off and gripe. And yes, if you do everything your employer asks of you and then some, you should be rewarded. What is this world coming to when doing so is considered "average"?
    - phamilton 12y ago
      If a promotion is available, then you are probably right. But if no position is available you could be the perfect employee and not get a promotion and there would be nothing wrong with that.
      - rhizome 12y ago
        Being passed-over implies a promotion was available.
    - pen2l 12y ago
      > And yes, if you do everything your employer asks of you and then some, you should be rewarded. What is this world coming to when doing so is considered "average"? You probably should, but the reality of a capitalistic system is you probably won't. I have a lot of friends who did everything they were told would get them good jobs, a stable pay, money to have a house, a vacation... but they have nothing. Not to discredit Pao, but I sometimes just laugh at people lamenting about not getting their millions whilst I'm sitting here, drinking with my suicidal buddy who's lamenting about not being able to land a job, after having submitted his resume to over a hundred places.
    - cbd1984 12y ago
      So if a man got passed over and a woman got the promotion, would the man have a good case, in your eyes? How about if they were both the same gender?
      - cbd1984 12y ago
        It seems like there's a conversation we're not having here, and a few people should not be allowed to force us to not have it.
    - AnkhMorporkian 12y ago
      Playing devil's advocate, being perfect at position X doesn't necessarily mean you'll be a good fit at position Y, and being less than perfect at position X doesn't mean you won't be a perfect fit in position Y.
      - ptaipale 12y ago
        Right. Remember Peter's Principle: Selection of a candidate for a position is based on the candidate's performance in their current role rather than on abilities relevant to the intended role. Thus, employees only stop being promoted once they can no longer perform effectively, and "managers rise to the level of their incompetence."
  - jegutman 12y ago
    To be clear, they fired her, they didn't just "not promote" her.
- MagicWishMonkey 12y ago
  Doing well in performance reviews doesn't mean much. It was pretty clear that she was not easy to work with, and a lot of her coworkers didn't like working with her. I have no doubt that she was a brilliant employee, but that doesn't really matter if no one wants to work with her. There's a reason why so many companies put a lot of emphasis on "culture fit".
  - jegutman 12y ago
    She was a fine culture fit. I can tell you this because they kept her around for quite a while. Bad culture fits don't last, especially not at a well-run firm. Culture fits aren't soul mates, there are still normal difficulties and things to work through. People had trouble working with her possibly after she brought up issues of sexual harassment and discrimination, but there's actually something under the law to protect her from this, anti-retaliation laws, which she tried to sue Kleiner over and lost, but that part of the case definitely seemed like there was some merit to although possibly not enough to meet a preponderance of the evidence.
    - growupkids 12y ago
      In reality bad culture hires stick around because most people are polite and assume it's just them, and They give difficult people second chances, they put up with them for a long time because they're not used to being around people that are that "off". So you can't assume just because someone isn't dismissed quickly that they automatically were a good hire. I've seen plenty of bad hires kept around because people were unable to grok why this person was difficult. They give them lots of second chances and it took time before everyone finally gave up. I'm not saying that's what happened here, what I am saying is you can't jump to a conclusion that because someone wasn't fired that means they were a good fit.
    - trhway 12y ago
      > I can tell you this because they kept her around for quite a while. what alternative did they have? A lawsuit "they gave me bad performance/fired me because i'm a woman"? A lawsuit which they would lose with much higher probability and much higher damages. They could only wait until she leaves on her own. >People had trouble working with her possibly after she brought up issues of sexual harassment and discrimination People had trouble working with her possibly because she is a total jerk - she complained that the assistant of her colleague was sending brain scans of dying from cancer mother from office. Wrt. promotion - promotion isn't something employee is entitled to. If you think company doesn't value you enough - get an offer at other place and you will immediately see how much your company really values you. Did Kleiner tried to keep her when she was leaving? Seems like they didn't. Why? Because she is a woman? Now at Reddit she installed "no negotiation" hiring policy. She seems to be unaware that in case of good employees it isn't the prospective employee who negotiates, it really his current employer who doesn't want the employee to leave. Probably her former employers has always just let her leave easy, without counters :)
- tsotha 12y ago
  She slept with a coworker. Who does this without realizing one of you may have to go?
  - zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
    Hundreds of thousands of people do this on a daily basis without having to leave their job.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - tsotha 12y ago
      And yet a whole lot of them do end up leaving. If you carry on an office romance, particularly when one or both of you is married, that's a possibility. I've seen it at my office - it's pretty common for people to be unable to work together after the breakup.
untog 12y ago
I don't know. Any details of the case aside, "shut up or pay $1m" doesn't ever look very dignified. Besides, by doing this they've put the case back in the news again - leave it and it goes away.
- echoless 12y ago
  How would it go away? Ellen Pao's going to appeal against the verdict which will lead to Kleiner-Perkins being in the news again.
tomasien 12y ago
I reject your plea not to downvote - not because I disagree (that is not an appropriate reason to downvote a comment on HN from my understanding) but because of two things: 1. You said "good for Kleiner". Whether you agree or not, KPCB is massive firm now asking threatening a $1MM suit against an individual who had good faith claims and that just feels really icky to be called "good". I'm fully aware that the burden of proof for damages rests with the plaintiff and she failed that claim, however this is nowhere near the frivolous lawsuit standard. I am going to also reject your plea for factual evidence because I'm not doing your research for you in this instance, but read over some summary judgements in frivolous lawsuit claims that have been ruled in the plaintiffs favor and compare it to the facts of this case. 2. You asked not to be downvoted. Pleas w/r/t voting do not belong on vote based social networks and forums. They are purely manipulative.
- res0nat0r 12y ago
  You probably would be taking a different tone if it were you whom was personally sued by someone which cost you a million dollars out of pocket, and then have every claim against you dismissed. Why should KPCB be any different in trying to recover money from a court case they won on every count? Just because they have $X amount of money more than you or I?
  - nulltype 12y ago
    I'm not sure a company can be personally sued.
    - cbd1984 12y ago
      > I'm not sure a company can be personally sued. Depending on what you mean by "personally sued", this is one of the main reasons limited liability corporations exist: So the shareholders aren't personally responsible for lawsuits the company gets involved in. This is where "corporate personhood" comes from, the idea that, in some limited circumstances, corporations can function as people to make legal proceedings possible. Suing a company to redress a grievance is feasible. The company has an office, assets, and so on. Trying to track down and sue everyone who has or had a financial stake in the company is not feasible, and if it were, companies would cease to exist because nobody could stomach the risk of all of their personal assets being up for grabs if a lawsuit doesn't go their way.
supercanuck 12y ago
Then why was it an 8-4 vote? Didnt it come down to one juror?
binxbolling 12y ago
Wow, it's super brave of you to be defending those poor maligned billionaires. Takes a lot of courage to stand up for an underdog like KPCB.
- SG- 12y ago
  Isn't she super rich too and a big CEO? Anyways, it's silly to take a side simply because one side has more money than the other, that has nothing to do with it.
  - selectodude 12y ago
    I guess it depends on how big you consider Reddit to be.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
michaelochurch 12y ago
It wasn't a frivolous or "merit-less" case. Before she initiated the lawsuit, she did not know what would be found in discovery. From her standpoint at the time, a suspicion of gender discrimination was valid. She hoped to find a "smoking gun" in discovery. There was no smoking gun, and she was far from a sympathetic or innocent plaintiff (the affair with Mr. Nazre really killed her) so she lost. Every bit of testimony from a Kleiner employee should be thrown out, at least on subjective matters like job performance. A person who is employed by one party or the other cannot possibly be expected to give a valid representation. No one's going to testify against someone who can end his career inside of a couple months (obviously with phony performance reviews, because no employer will admit to firing someone over inconvenient testimony). Do I think that the jury made the right call? Sadly, I'd say "yes". I think that she did end up on the wrong side of an exclusionary culture (that may have been for reasons other than her gender; you never know if it's ethnicity or gender or health or age, the last of which can cut against young or old depending on the group) and was therefore evaluated inaccurately and unfairly. She failed to prove it, though. It would have been very different if discovery had brought forward a smoking gun that proves gendered discrimination... which didn't happen, but there's no way she could have possibly known that. This is the thing about discrimination that most HN posters don't get. It's not like the people who are guilty of it (and there are many, along age and gender and ethnic and class lines) make it obvious. They don't. It's a silent crime. Most of the time, the victims have no idea that it is happening. They might have suspicions, but it's hard as hell to prove. Ellen Pao tried to do so and came close, but ultimately failed in proving anything conclusive.
- Natsu 12y ago
  Making claims one is unable to substantiate and dragging a case through discovery is normally considered an abuse of the legal system, as we saw in, e.g. SCO vs. IBM, where they also hoped to be able to eventually find an IBM document somewhere that might prove them right. The fact that they did not find any such "smoking gun" after all that legal discovery makes me believe that they are honest, as that means they couldn't find anything at all after a lot of searching.
  - pyre 12y ago

jegutman 12y ago

There were performance reviews that said she did well, they were mixed and complicated like all performance reviews. Also given that the defense tried to discredit her by noting that she sent e-mails to herself it seems strange to call "she said they said" invalid evidence since without those e-mails there would be nothing at all. What would hard evidence even be for this type of case? Is there going to be an e-mail between partners saying "we should not promote Ellen because she's a woman"? Did Ellen Pao prove her case conclusively? I think not. Was it clear that there were plenty of issues going on at the time that Kleiner could've handled a lot better? I think so.

zxcvvcxz 12y ago
Even perfect performance reviews doesn't entitle one to be promoted. Why does everyone have this idea in their head, that if they cross all the t's and dot all the i's the world is going to reward them? Are we really going to start to sue over disillusionment?
- tw04 12y ago
  When a woman who has perfect reviews is passed over for a promotion by a man who doesn't... ya, they have some room to be pissed off and gripe. And yes, if you do everything your employer asks of you and then some, you should be rewarded. What is this world coming to when doing so is considered "average"?
  - phamilton 12y ago
    If a promotion is available, then you are probably right. But if no position is available you could be the perfect employee and not get a promotion and there would be nothing wrong with that.
    - rhizome 12y ago
      Being passed-over implies a promotion was available.
  - pen2l 12y ago
    > And yes, if you do everything your employer asks of you and then some, you should be rewarded. What is this world coming to when doing so is considered "average"? You probably should, but the reality of a capitalistic system is you probably won't. I have a lot of friends who did everything they were told would get them good jobs, a stable pay, money to have a house, a vacation... but they have nothing. Not to discredit Pao, but I sometimes just laugh at people lamenting about not getting their millions whilst I'm sitting here, drinking with my suicidal buddy who's lamenting about not being able to land a job, after having submitted his resume to over a hundred places.
  - cbd1984 12y ago
    So if a man got passed over and a woman got the promotion, would the man have a good case, in your eyes? How about if they were both the same gender?
    - cbd1984 12y ago
      It seems like there's a conversation we're not having here, and a few people should not be allowed to force us to not have it.
  - AnkhMorporkian 12y ago
    Playing devil's advocate, being perfect at position X doesn't necessarily mean you'll be a good fit at position Y, and being less than perfect at position X doesn't mean you won't be a perfect fit in position Y.
    - ptaipale 12y ago
      Right. Remember Peter's Principle: Selection of a candidate for a position is based on the candidate's performance in their current role rather than on abilities relevant to the intended role. Thus, employees only stop being promoted once they can no longer perform effectively, and "managers rise to the level of their incompetence."
- jegutman 12y ago
  To be clear, they fired her, they didn't just "not promote" her.
MagicWishMonkey 12y ago
Doing well in performance reviews doesn't mean much. It was pretty clear that she was not easy to work with, and a lot of her coworkers didn't like working with her. I have no doubt that she was a brilliant employee, but that doesn't really matter if no one wants to work with her. There's a reason why so many companies put a lot of emphasis on "culture fit".
- jegutman 12y ago
  She was a fine culture fit. I can tell you this because they kept her around for quite a while. Bad culture fits don't last, especially not at a well-run firm. Culture fits aren't soul mates, there are still normal difficulties and things to work through. People had trouble working with her possibly after she brought up issues of sexual harassment and discrimination, but there's actually something under the law to protect her from this, anti-retaliation laws, which she tried to sue Kleiner over and lost, but that part of the case definitely seemed like there was some merit to although possibly not enough to meet a preponderance of the evidence.
  - growupkids 12y ago
    In reality bad culture hires stick around because most people are polite and assume it's just them, and They give difficult people second chances, they put up with them for a long time because they're not used to being around people that are that "off". So you can't assume just because someone isn't dismissed quickly that they automatically were a good hire. I've seen plenty of bad hires kept around because people were unable to grok why this person was difficult. They give them lots of second chances and it took time before everyone finally gave up. I'm not saying that's what happened here, what I am saying is you can't jump to a conclusion that because someone wasn't fired that means they were a good fit.
  - trhway 12y ago
    > I can tell you this because they kept her around for quite a while. what alternative did they have? A lawsuit "they gave me bad performance/fired me because i'm a woman"? A lawsuit which they would lose with much higher probability and much higher damages. They could only wait until she leaves on her own. >People had trouble working with her possibly after she brought up issues of sexual harassment and discrimination People had trouble working with her possibly because she is a total jerk - she complained that the assistant of her colleague was sending brain scans of dying from cancer mother from office. Wrt. promotion - promotion isn't something employee is entitled to. If you think company doesn't value you enough - get an offer at other place and you will immediately see how much your company really values you. Did Kleiner tried to keep her when she was leaving? Seems like they didn't. Why? Because she is a woman? Now at Reddit she installed "no negotiation" hiring policy. She seems to be unaware that in case of good employees it isn't the prospective employee who negotiates, it really his current employer who doesn't want the employee to leave. Probably her former employers has always just let her leave easy, without counters :)
tsotha 12y ago
She slept with a coworker. Who does this without realizing one of you may have to go?
- zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
  Hundreds of thousands of people do this on a daily basis without having to leave their job.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - tsotha 12y ago
    And yet a whole lot of them do end up leaving. If you carry on an office romance, particularly when one or both of you is married, that's a possibility. I've seen it at my office - it's pretty common for people to be unable to work together after the breakup.

untog 12y ago

I don't know. Any details of the case aside, "shut up or pay $1m" doesn't ever look very dignified. Besides, by doing this they've put the case back in the news again - leave it and it goes away.

echoless 12y ago
How would it go away? Ellen Pao's going to appeal against the verdict which will lead to Kleiner-Perkins being in the news again.

tomasien 12y ago

I reject your plea not to downvote - not because I disagree (that is not an appropriate reason to downvote a comment on HN from my understanding) but because of two things: 1. You said "good for Kleiner". Whether you agree or not, KPCB is massive firm now asking threatening a $1MM suit against an individual who had good faith claims and that just feels really icky to be called "good". I'm fully aware that the burden of proof for damages rests with the plaintiff and she failed that claim, however this is nowhere near the frivolous lawsuit standard. I am going to also reject your plea for factual evidence because I'm not doing your research for you in this instance, but read over some summary judgements in frivolous lawsuit claims that have been ruled in the plaintiffs favor and compare it to the facts of this case. 2. You asked not to be downvoted. Pleas w/r/t voting do not belong on vote based social networks and forums. They are purely manipulative.

res0nat0r 12y ago
You probably would be taking a different tone if it were you whom was personally sued by someone which cost you a million dollars out of pocket, and then have every claim against you dismissed. Why should KPCB be any different in trying to recover money from a court case they won on every count? Just because they have $X amount of money more than you or I?
- nulltype 12y ago
  I'm not sure a company can be personally sued.
  - cbd1984 12y ago
    > I'm not sure a company can be personally sued. Depending on what you mean by "personally sued", this is one of the main reasons limited liability corporations exist: So the shareholders aren't personally responsible for lawsuits the company gets involved in. This is where "corporate personhood" comes from, the idea that, in some limited circumstances, corporations can function as people to make legal proceedings possible. Suing a company to redress a grievance is feasible. The company has an office, assets, and so on. Trying to track down and sue everyone who has or had a financial stake in the company is not feasible, and if it were, companies would cease to exist because nobody could stomach the risk of all of their personal assets being up for grabs if a lawsuit doesn't go their way.

supercanuck 12y ago

Then why was it an 8-4 vote? Didnt it come down to one juror?

binxbolling 12y ago

Wow, it's super brave of you to be defending those poor maligned billionaires. Takes a lot of courage to stand up for an underdog like KPCB.

SG- 12y ago
Isn't she super rich too and a big CEO? Anyways, it's silly to take a side simply because one side has more money than the other, that has nothing to do with it.
- selectodude 12y ago
  I guess it depends on how big you consider Reddit to be.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

michaelochurch 12y ago

It wasn't a frivolous or "merit-less" case. Before she initiated the lawsuit, she did not know what would be found in discovery. From her standpoint at the time, a suspicion of gender discrimination was valid. She hoped to find a "smoking gun" in discovery. There was no smoking gun, and she was far from a sympathetic or innocent plaintiff (the affair with Mr. Nazre really killed her) so she lost. Every bit of testimony from a Kleiner employee should be thrown out, at least on subjective matters like job performance. A person who is employed by one party or the other cannot possibly be expected to give a valid representation. No one's going to testify against someone who can end his career inside of a couple months (obviously with phony performance reviews, because no employer will admit to firing someone over inconvenient testimony). Do I think that the jury made the right call? Sadly, I'd say "yes". I think that she did end up on the wrong side of an exclusionary culture (that may have been for reasons other than her gender; you never know if it's ethnicity or gender or health or age, the last of which can cut against young or old depending on the group) and was therefore evaluated inaccurately and unfairly. She failed to prove it, though. It would have been very different if discovery had brought forward a smoking gun that proves gendered discrimination... which didn't happen, but there's no way she could have possibly known that. This is the thing about discrimination that most HN posters don't get. It's not like the people who are guilty of it (and there are many, along age and gender and ethnic and class lines) make it obvious. They don't. It's a silent crime. Most of the time, the victims have no idea that it is happening. They might have suspicions, but it's hard as hell to prove. Ellen Pao tried to do so and came close, but ultimately failed in proving anything conclusive.

Natsu 12y ago
Making claims one is unable to substantiate and dragging a case through discovery is normally considered an abuse of the legal system, as we saw in, e.g. SCO vs. IBM, where they also hoped to be able to eventually find an IBM document somewhere that might prove them right. The fact that they did not find any such "smoking gun" after all that legal discovery makes me believe that they are honest, as that means they couldn't find anything at all after a lot of searching.
- pyre 12y ago