Over my career in the software industry, I’ve worked for several companies who provided a stock option plan as part of their employee compensation scheme. Exactly one of those companies’ programs ever provided me with any actual tangible benefit (the company was bought, and the options were bought back at market rate). It netted me a couple of thousand dollars. Options may have been a way to get rich in the early 1990s, but they’re pretty much a longshot lottery ticket now.
Skype has found a sneaky way of making that longshot chance even more unlikely to pay off:
Employees aren’t even able to keep the vested portion of their stock options. The vast majority of stock options granted to startups have a vesting period, typically four years, with chunks of those options becoming vested during that four year (or whatever) period. If options are vested you can exercise them, pay for the stock and own that stock. At least that’s the way things have been done over the decades.
Skype did things differently. With Skype stock options the company has the right to not only terminate unvested options, but also vested ones. And any vested options that you’ve exercised (meaning you paid cash for them) that were turned into actual shares could simply be bought back by the company at the price you paid, regardless of their current value.
Turning your potentially lucrative stock holdings (if the value was higher than your strike price) into a mandatory zero-interest savings account. Nice.
The fact that Skype adopted this plan in the first place isn’t in itself “evil.” But they’ve done two things wrong from what I can tell.
First it appears that employees had no idea what they were signing and they probably expected it would be a normal stock option type deal that everyone in Silicon Valley has done for decades. If Skype wasn’t crystal clear with them, and explained it in normal human language that they understood, then these employees were intentionally misled. Skype had an incentive to make things unclear, because employees would demand far more compensation if they had understood. The fact that employees are so surprised that this is happening suggests that they didn’t understand the agreement. This is what lawyers call fraud.
The second thing Skype did wrong was not to waive this clause with the looming acquisition. The company can deny all day long that they fired these employees for cause, not to save a few dollars on stock options. But the appearance is the exact opposite.
