I haven’t followed closely—from outside, it seems like pretty standard big-growth-tech behavior. One thing to keep in mind is that “vested equity” is pretty inviolable. These are grants that have been fully earned and delivered to the employee, and are theirs forever. It’s the “unvested” or “semi-vested” equity that’s usually in question—these are shares that are conditionally promised to employees, which will vest at some specified time or event—usually some combination of time in good standing and liquidity events (for a non-public company).
It’s quite possible (and VERY common) that employees who leave are offered “accelerated vesting” on some of their granted-but-not-vested shares in exchange for signing agreements and making things easy for the company. I don’t know if that’s what OpenAI is doing, but I’d be shocked if they somehow took away any vested shares from departing employees.
It would be pretty sketchy to consider unvested grants to be part of one’s net worth—certainly banks won’t lend on it. Vested shared are just shares, they’re yours like any other asset.
Trying to figure out how to update. From the downvotes and comments, I’m clearly considered wrong, but I can’t easily find details on how. Is the statement “We have not and never will take away vested equity” a flat-out lie? I’d expected it was relying heavily on the word “vested”, and what they took away was something non-vested.
Is there a simple link to a specific legal description of what assets a non-signer was entitled to, but lost due to declining to sign?
Edit: Zvi recently linked to OpenAI NDAs: Leaked documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees—Vox, which does have pretty compelling references that my assumptions were wrong, that the denial was a verifiably false statement, and they did, in fact, credibly threaten to take back vested equity. I’ve checked my equity in past (private, so not exercisable unless they have a liquidity event) and current (public, so exercisable immediately on vest) employers, and this doesn’t seem possible for them. OpenAI is an outlier in defining their equity that way (such that “vested” is contingent).
I haven’t followed closely—from outside, it seems like pretty standard big-growth-tech behavior. One thing to keep in mind is that “vested equity” is pretty inviolable. These are grants that have been fully earned and delivered to the employee, and are theirs forever. It’s the “unvested” or “semi-vested” equity that’s usually in question—these are shares that are conditionally promised to employees, which will vest at some specified time or event—usually some combination of time in good standing and liquidity events (for a non-public company).
It’s quite possible (and VERY common) that employees who leave are offered “accelerated vesting” on some of their granted-but-not-vested shares in exchange for signing agreements and making things easy for the company. I don’t know if that’s what OpenAI is doing, but I’d be shocked if they somehow took away any vested shares from departing employees.
It would be pretty sketchy to consider unvested grants to be part of one’s net worth—certainly banks won’t lend on it. Vested shared are just shares, they’re yours like any other asset.
Consider yourself shocked.
Trying to figure out how to update. From the downvotes and comments, I’m clearly considered wrong, but I can’t easily find details on how. Is the statement “We have not and never will take away vested equity” a flat-out lie? I’d expected it was relying heavily on the word “vested”, and what they took away was something non-vested.
Is there a simple link to a specific legal description of what assets a non-signer was entitled to, but lost due to declining to sign?
Edit: Zvi recently linked to OpenAI NDAs: Leaked documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees—Vox, which does have pretty compelling references that my assumptions were wrong, that the denial was a verifiably false statement, and they did, in fact, credibly threaten to take back vested equity. I’ve checked my equity in past (private, so not exercisable unless they have a liquidity event) and current (public, so exercisable immediately on vest) employers, and this doesn’t seem possible for them. OpenAI is an outlier in defining their equity that way (such that “vested” is contingent).