How much does it make a difference that Lincoln just came out and volunteered that information? The non-disparagement contracts are not themselves hidden.
They were hidden up until this very moment, from me, presumably with a clause in the NDA that contractually committed everyone who signed them to keep them hidden from me.
I am pretty sure many past Wave employees would have brought them up to me had they not been asked to sign an NDA in order to get their severance package. I agree it’s worth something that Lincoln just said it straightforwardly, though my sense is this only happened because Jeff did something slightly risky under his NDA, by leaking some relevant information (there are not that many places Jeff worked, so him saying he knew about one organization, and having to check for permission, was leaking some decent number of bits, possibly enough to risk a suit if Lincoln wanted to), and me finding this out was sheer luck, and in most worlds I would have never found out.
FWIW: I have an NDA from Wave. I negotiated at the time to be able to mention the existence of the NDA, and that it didn’t restrict private conversation, just public statements. You and I have probably talked about Wave, and I guess it never occurred to me to mention the NDA because I knew it was standard and it wasn’t restricting my private speech. I wasn’t keeping it secret, I’ve talked about it with people when it has come up, but I didn’t make a point of doing so.
So I don’t think it’s obvious you’d know about the NDA if it weren’t self-protecting.
It’s possible I should have disclosed the NDA every time I said something positive about Wave in public. I think that would have occurred to me if I’d ever been talking about Wave qua Wave, but it was always as an example in posts that were focused on something else, so that feels like a lot of overhead.
Edit: I guess I should say I think the ban on disclosing the existence of the agreement is very bad, and that’s why I negotiated to change it (and would have walked if they hadn’t, despite not having anything I was burning to say). But I had that right and still didn’t mention it to habryka in medicine.
Aside: can we taboo “NDA” in this discussion? It seems pretty fucked that it means both non-disparagement-agreement and non-disclosure-agreement and it’s annoying to track which one people are referring to.
Oh man, it’s worse than that. My original paperwork had both a non-disparagement clause and a non-disclosure clause relating to the agreement itself. The latter was removed in my agreement but presumably not others’.
While I have the emails open, I want to note that the lawyer described the agreement as pretty standard.
There are enough EA orgs that I know something about (and that other people know I know something about) that I think the number of bits I was leaking here was pretty low?
Another thing that’s not visible is that I sent Lincoln an email linking to this thread, which I expect is why he jumped in with more context. I really appreciate him doing so, and don’t want him and Wave to end up worse off than in a world in which he’d stayed quiet.
possibly enough to risk a suit if Lincoln wanted to
Would be pretty tough to do given the legal dubiousness re: enforceability of non-disparagement agreements in the US (note: the judgement applies retroactively)
How much does it make a difference that Lincoln just came out and volunteered that information? The non-disparagement contracts are not themselves hidden.
They were hidden up until this very moment, from me, presumably with a clause in the NDA that contractually committed everyone who signed them to keep them hidden from me.
I am pretty sure many past Wave employees would have brought them up to me had they not been asked to sign an NDA in order to get their severance package. I agree it’s worth something that Lincoln just said it straightforwardly, though my sense is this only happened because Jeff did something slightly risky under his NDA, by leaking some relevant information (there are not that many places Jeff worked, so him saying he knew about one organization, and having to check for permission, was leaking some decent number of bits, possibly enough to risk a suit if Lincoln wanted to), and me finding this out was sheer luck, and in most worlds I would have never found out.
FWIW: I have an NDA from Wave. I negotiated at the time to be able to mention the existence of the NDA, and that it didn’t restrict private conversation, just public statements. You and I have probably talked about Wave, and I guess it never occurred to me to mention the NDA because I knew it was standard and it wasn’t restricting my private speech. I wasn’t keeping it secret, I’ve talked about it with people when it has come up, but I didn’t make a point of doing so.
So I don’t think it’s obvious you’d know about the NDA if it weren’t self-protecting.
It’s possible I should have disclosed the NDA every time I said something positive about Wave in public. I think that would have occurred to me if I’d ever been talking about Wave qua Wave, but it was always as an example in posts that were focused on something else, so that feels like a lot of overhead.
Edit: I guess I should say I think the ban on disclosing the existence of the agreement is very bad, and that’s why I negotiated to change it (and would have walked if they hadn’t, despite not having anything I was burning to say). But I had that right and still didn’t mention it to habryka in medicine.
Aside: can we taboo “NDA” in this discussion? It seems pretty fucked that it means both non-disparagement-agreement and non-disclosure-agreement and it’s annoying to track which one people are referring to.
Oh man, it’s worse than that. My original paperwork had both a non-disparagement clause and a non-disclosure clause relating to the agreement itself. The latter was removed in my agreement but presumably not others’.
While I have the emails open, I want to note that the lawyer described the agreement as pretty standard.
There are enough EA orgs that I know something about (and that other people know I know something about) that I think the number of bits I was leaking here was pretty low?
Another thing that’s not visible is that I sent Lincoln an email linking to this thread, which I expect is why he jumped in with more context. I really appreciate him doing so, and don’t want him and Wave to end up worse off than in a world in which he’d stayed quiet.
Would be pretty tough to do given the legal dubiousness re: enforceability of non-disparagement agreements in the US (note: the judgement applies retroactively)