See Also: - Microsoft Buys Skype for $8.5 Billion. And they do no good at all for the reputation of private equity companies more generally. I don’t know where they got these techniques from, but they’re very alien to Silicon Valley and indeed the rest of the business world. Last week, Skype took heat for firing three executives just weeks before the company’s 8.5 billion acquisition by Microsoft (MSFT) is expected to close. Unless and until such an investor wants to go on the record defending Silver Lake here, I’m going to believe Lee, and assume that it’s Silver Lake who’s largely to blame for the utter breakdown of employer-employee relations at Skype. opened a new office and hired several hundred peopleĪll of this makes any Skype investor saying “it’s not us, it’s the CEO” sound naive at best and, more likely, downright disingenuous.fired, re-interviewed, and re-hired Product Managers.created an entirely new product development org structure.What’s more, I simply don’t believe that Skype did all of this itself, without detailed input from Silver Lake. I no longer think that what Skype did here is pretty evil: I now think it’s downright evil, and destroys the balance of trust on which Silicon Valley has been built. The statement that the clause was designed “to retain the best and the brightest people” is clearly a lie, since Skype’s best and brightest had no idea it even existed, and Skype made no attempt to call their attention to it. Skype - uniquely, I think, although anybody else owned by Silver Lake should be taking a long cold look at their option grants right now - decided to more or less invalidate that vesting schedule with a highly opaque clause which was clearly designed to be incomprehensible to anybody without extremely good lawyers. Silicon Valley companies attract employees by giving them options which vest over time. O’Shaughnessy seems to have been the source for the GigaOm blog post, and with this on-the-record quote he’s rendered himself utterly unreliable. This individual chose to leave, therefore he doesn’t get that benefit.”
The company chose to include that clause in the contract in order to retain the best and the brightest people to build great products. When asked about Lee’s situation, Skype spokesman Brian O’Shaughnessy said, “You’ve got to be in it to win it.
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