Yeah, I guess that’s fair—you have much more insight into the number of and viewpoints of Wave’s departing employees than I do. Maybe “would be a bit surprised” would have cashed out to “<40% Lincoln ever spent 5+ min thinking about this, before this week”, which I’d update a bit upwards to 50⁄50 based on your comment.
For context, I don’t think I pushed back on (or even substantively noticed) the NDA in my own severance agreement, whereas I did push back quite heavily on the standard “assignment of inventions” thing they asked me to sign when I joined. That said, I was pretty happy with my time and trusted my boss enough to not expect for the NDA terms to matter.
Below you can see Elizabeth writing about how she successfully pushed back and got it removed from her agreement, so it does seem like my guess was correct! [EDIT: except nothing in her post mentions Lincoln, so probably not]
(I didn’t know about Elizabeth’s situation before her post)
It’s been a while but I think I remember who I negotiated with and it wasn’t Lincoln (or Drew, the other co-founder). I find it pretty plausible that person had the authority to make changes to my agreement without running them by the founders, but would not have had the authority to change the default. So it’s entirely possible multiple people pushed back but it never reached the conscious attention of the founders.
And it may not have even come up that often. I think I am several sigmas out in my willingness to read legal paperwork, push back, and walk away from severance payments, so you’d need a large sample to have it come up frequently. Wave probably hasn’t laid off or fired that many people with severance, and presumably the founders were less likely to hear about pushback as the company grew.
So it just seems really likely to me that Wave didn’t invest its limited energy in writing its own severance agreement, and the situation didn’t have enough feedback loops to make people with decision-making power question that.
Yeah, I guess that’s fair—you have much more insight into the number of and viewpoints of Wave’s departing employees than I do. Maybe “would be a bit surprised” would have cashed out to “<40% Lincoln ever spent 5+ min thinking about this, before this week”, which I’d update a bit upwards to 50⁄50 based on your comment.
For context, I don’t think I pushed back on (or even substantively noticed) the NDA in my own severance agreement, whereas I did push back quite heavily on the standard “assignment of inventions” thing they asked me to sign when I joined. That said, I was pretty happy with my time and trusted my boss enough to not expect for the NDA terms to matter.
Below you can see Elizabeth writing about how she successfully pushed back and got it removed from her agreement, so it does seem like my guess was correct! [EDIT: except nothing in her post mentions Lincoln, so probably not]
(I didn’t know about Elizabeth’s situation before her post)
It’s been a while but I think I remember who I negotiated with and it wasn’t Lincoln (or Drew, the other co-founder). I find it pretty plausible that person had the authority to make changes to my agreement without running them by the founders, but would not have had the authority to change the default. So it’s entirely possible multiple people pushed back but it never reached the conscious attention of the founders.
And it may not have even come up that often. I think I am several sigmas out in my willingness to read legal paperwork, push back, and walk away from severance payments, so you’d need a large sample to have it come up frequently. Wave probably hasn’t laid off or fired that many people with severance, and presumably the founders were less likely to hear about pushback as the company grew.
So it just seems really likely to me that Wave didn’t invest its limited energy in writing its own severance agreement, and the situation didn’t have enough feedback loops to make people with decision-making power question that.