Yeah fwiw I wanted to echo that Oli’s statement seems like an overreaction? My sense is that such NDAs are standard issue in tech (I’ve signed one before myself), and that having one at Wave is not evidence of a lapse in integrity; it’s the kind of thing that’s very easy to just defer to legal counsel on. Though the opposite (dropping the NDA) would be evidence of high integrity, imo!
Most people in the world lie from time to time, and are aware that their friends lie. Nonetheless I don’t think that Lincoln would lie to me. As a result, I trust his word.
Most CEOs get people who work for them to sign contracts agreeing that they won’t share negative/critical information about the company. Nonetheless I didn’t think that Lincoln would get people he works with to sign contracts not to share negative/critical information about Wave. As a result, I trusted the general perception I had of Wave.
I currently feel a bit tricked, not dissimilar to if I found out Lincoln had intentionally lied to me on some minor matter. While it is common for people to lie, it’s not the relationship I thought I had here.
I definitely feel like “intentionally lying” is still a much much stronger norm violation than what happened here. There’s like a million decisions that you have to make as a CEO and you don’t typically want to spend your decisionmaking time/innovation budget on random minutiae like “what terms are included inside our severance agreements?” I would be a bit surprised if “should we include a NDA & non-disclosure” had even risen to the level of a conscious decision of Lincoln’s at any point throughout Wave’s history, as opposed to eg getting boilerplate legal contracts from their lawyers/an online form and then copying that for each severance agreement thereafter.
There’s like a million decisions that you have to make as a CEO and you don’t typically want to spend your decisionmaking time/innovation budget on random minutiae like “what terms are included inside our severance agreements?”
Technically true, but also somewhat reminds me of this.
I would be a bit surprised if “should we include a NDA & non-disclosure” had even risen to the level of a conscious decision of Lincoln’s at any point throughout Wave’s history
I think it’s pretty likely that at least one departing employee would have pushed back on it some, so I wouldn’t be surprised?
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.
Epistemic status: Thinking out loud. Overall I’m rather confused about what to think here.
Yeah. And there is a Chesterton’s Fence element here too. Like as CEO, if you really want to go with a non-standard legal thing, you probably would want to make sure you understand why the standard thing is what it is.
Which, well, I guess you can just pay someone a few hundred dollars to tell you. Which I’d expect someone with the right kind of moral integrity to do. And I’d expect the answer to be something along the lines of:
If you actually treat people well, it only offers a pretty small degree of protection. And standard thinking only accounts for selfish company interests, not actual altruistic concern for employees or the norms you do or don’t endorse. So if you do care about the latter and intend to treat people well, it would probably make sense to get rid of it.
Although, perhaps it’d take a special lawyer to actually be frank with you and acknowledge all of that. And you’d probably want to get a second and third and fourth opinion too. But still, seeking that out seems like a somewhat obvious thing to do for someone with moral integrity. And if you do in fact get the response I described above, ditching the non-disparagement seems like a somewhat obvious way to respond.
Yeah fwiw I wanted to echo that Oli’s statement seems like an overreaction? My sense is that such NDAs are standard issue in tech (I’ve signed one before myself), and that having one at Wave is not evidence of a lapse in integrity; it’s the kind of thing that’s very easy to just defer to legal counsel on. Though the opposite (dropping the NDA) would be evidence of high integrity, imo!
Most people in the world lie from time to time, and are aware that their friends lie. Nonetheless I don’t think that Lincoln would lie to me. As a result, I trust his word.
Most CEOs get people who work for them to sign contracts agreeing that they won’t share negative/critical information about the company. Nonetheless I didn’t think that Lincoln would get people he works with to sign contracts not to share negative/critical information about Wave. As a result, I trusted the general perception I had of Wave.
I currently feel a bit tricked, not dissimilar to if I found out Lincoln had intentionally lied to me on some minor matter. While it is common for people to lie, it’s not the relationship I thought I had here.
I definitely feel like “intentionally lying” is still a much much stronger norm violation than what happened here. There’s like a million decisions that you have to make as a CEO and you don’t typically want to spend your decisionmaking time/innovation budget on random minutiae like “what terms are included inside our severance agreements?” I would be a bit surprised if “should we include a NDA & non-disclosure” had even risen to the level of a conscious decision of Lincoln’s at any point throughout Wave’s history, as opposed to eg getting boilerplate legal contracts from their lawyers/an online form and then copying that for each severance agreement thereafter.
Technically true, but also somewhat reminds me of this.
I think it’s pretty likely that at least one departing employee would have pushed back on it some, so I wouldn’t be surprised?
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.
Epistemic status: Thinking out loud. Overall I’m rather confused about what to think here.
Yeah. And there is a Chesterton’s Fence element here too. Like as CEO, if you really want to go with a non-standard legal thing, you probably would want to make sure you understand why the standard thing is what it is.
Which, well, I guess you can just pay someone a few hundred dollars to tell you. Which I’d expect someone with the right kind of moral integrity to do. And I’d expect the answer to be something along the lines of:
Although, perhaps it’d take a special lawyer to actually be frank with you and acknowledge all of that. And you’d probably want to get a second and third and fourth opinion too. But still, seeking that out seems like a somewhat obvious thing to do for someone with moral integrity. And if you do in fact get the response I described above, ditching the non-disparagement seems like a somewhat obvious way to respond.