
Tanium is facing employee unrest and an executive exodus - pinewurst
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-13/tanium-s-family-empire-is-in-crisis
======
papabrown
While stealing the employee stock options is beyond pale, the real issue is
what the working environment must be like there. I was in a similar situation
many years ago with a completely corrupt management team. My boss and I got
off on the wrong foot when he asked me to lie about another employee he wanted
to fire and I refused (which led to him then trying to find people to dish
dirt on me so he could fire me).

The CEO and president were fully aware this kind of stuff was going on but
looked the other way because he was producing the results they wanted to see
(they weren't exactly clean either and several years later were both indicted
on criminal charges).

I saw multiple people break down in tears due to the pressure he put on them.
Everyone was stressed out all the time. People were constantly in poor health
due to the stress. Backstabbing was normal operating procedure just to stay
off the hit list. People would doing anything to suck up to the boss so they
could keep their job another week, or month, or quarter hoping things would
get better.

After I left the company I couldn't believe I put up with that. My health was
in the toilet. Mentally I was wasted. I remember at my next job constantly
worrying that everyone who was being nice to me was setting me up. I parsed
every word people said to me looking for a trap. It took me a full year before
I could sleep more than four hours a night.

The ones who have left or were let go are the lucky ones. The stock can't be
worth the physical and emotional damage.

I've worked in a lot of high pressure jobs before that one and since then but
that place will always stand out as the most damaging period in my life.

~~~
Balgair
Now, I read these accounts and I wonder, if this is how businesses are run,
even a small fraction of them, how are they in business at all? Like, it seems
'business' is _really_ forgiving in terms of staying alive, like turning a
profit must be really easy if these morons can do it and stay afloat for any
length of time. But you go on /r/entrepreneur or some threads on HN and it is
made out to be just a real drag and really really hard to do. What am I
missing here, why the disconnect?

~~~
papabrown
I think you might be looking at it from the wrong angle. Some of the most
morally bankrupt people I've ever met are crazy intelligent. You seem to
equate being a sociopath with being a moron and that is more often than not a
poor assumption.

The other aspect that I think you're overlooking is that people who are wired
like this are often incredibly driven people. Sure, someone on /r/entrepreneur
might be willing to give up everything to pursue their dream but a sociopath
is willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get what they want.

~~~
Balgair
Oh no, I agree, being an asshole and being smart are independent variables,
it's a roll of the genetic dice. I meant: how are these folks who are both
stupid _and_ an asshole still kicking around?

------
tptacek
There are bad reasons to quit a company and good ones, but there are few
better ways to make an exit than _on the spot_ when the CEO of your company
personally and publicly berates a low-level employee in front of the team.

~~~
late2part
Correct. If you tolerate, if you blindly allow, if you accept without action -
you implicitly endorse.

I remember a time 10 years ago when a flight attendant harassed a person
behind me unfairly. I regret not standing up for that person.

Don't be a bystander - do the right thing!

~~~
rboyd
Easy to say, and I mostly agree, but it can be tough. I've seen a few of these
cases of bully management and what you notice is that the team under the
manager (and the teams around the manager) all already realize and communicate
(sometimes just glances, sometimes quite openly) that the manager is a
problem. So making a dramatic exit to make a point sometimes only makes an
obvious point.

There are other factors too. Maybe you have a unique skillset and it takes
some time to find similar employment, maybe you stay for family reasons, or
for a (probably misguided) sense of loyalty to the team. In my last relevant
personal experience, it was obviously a hostile work environment fairly early
on but I had made an informal commitment to stay on for X amount of time when
I joined.

Abusive managers often actually score big wins in short order and garner favor
from higher management, but inevitably we see those managers burn out the
systems they build and the systems around them. Employees start bouncing out
at an accelerating pace and it's a compounding effect usually because an
already overtaxed team is now smaller and has to pick up the slack of the
departed.

It usually ends badly.

Which of course factors back into the decision not to make a public display of
an exit -- karma usually finds a way to sort these things out.

I think it's probably the case that a lot of these managers are completely
oblivious to their actions. I had one manager who proudly claimed (to the
team) knowledge of sneaky political tactics and posted articles on fb about
Machiavelli and corporate tactics for grabbing and wielding power. It's quite
an awkward thing to watch and they're usually not fooling anybody.

~~~
ascendantlogic
Walking out instantly is a romantic idea for people who either have fat bank
accounts to fall back on or little-to-no responsibility outside of work to
worry about. For the rest of us something like that is indeed a reason to
immediately seek other employment, but just because you don't walk out
instantly doesn't mean you are supporting that behavior.

~~~
ForHackernews
You mean people like extremely well-paid developers with in-demand skills who
get contacted by recruiters multiple times a week?

~~~
ascendantlogic
I am all of those things and I still can't just stand up and walk out. I have
a wife, 2 kids and a house payment to think about. Prudence demands that I
line up future employment before giving my current employer the finger.

------
pdog
_> One of the most unnerving aspects of life at Tanium is what's known
internally as _Orion's List _. The CEO allegedly kept a close eye on which
employees would soon be eligible to take sizable chunks of stock. For those he
could stand to do without, Hindawi ordered the workers to be fired before they
were able to acquire the shares, according to current and former employees._

Employees at startups generally take a below-market salary in exchange for
equity compensation, so imagine the double humiliation of being fired because
your first shred of equity is about to vest.

~~~
balladeer
My friend worked for startup, here in India, that was doing work with drones
and water level measurements or something like that. It was and still is a
pre-VC startup. He had left a huge European MNC where did cutting edge
research but was bored and needed the bleeding edge rush and excitement as he
put it. He's awesome in his field and then excellent at coding too (not a CSE
grad) he was paid really grand in that MNC.

So he was getting less than half of his MNC salary at this drone startup. He
was totally immersed in making and breaking things with weekends stopping to
exist for him and evenings and nights blurring. For pretty much 10 months.

He was asked to resign a day after demo day where potential investors raved
about the product his team (3 people) had finished. Another team mate was also
asked to leave within a week. Both of them were given a reason on the lines
"excellent engineer but won't be a good fit in the culture and your product
was not well appreciated". Only remaining team mate was a confounder who used
to pass on requirements. Of course both ex employed didn't get anything. He
said he needed at least 2 more months to get some stocks as he would get
instalments after every completed year.

He took a break of around two months. Relaxing, slowly getting back to rhythm.
Him being good and being from IITB meant he had literally hundreds of
recruiter mails every week. But he calmly deleted any mail which had startup
mentioned anywhere in it.

Sometimes back his previous manager recruited him back at the same European
MNC with a substantial pay raise.

My point of writing isn't sharing a generic burnt by a startup anecdote with
you. He tries to remain calm but I, and many other friends, can see that he
has been deeply scarred by the deception and (I would call it) betrayal.

~~~
jacquesm
I've had something similar to this happen early in my career, it took two
years out of my life and cost me what I thought was a good personal
relationship but which turned out to be just predatory in retrospect.

Those are expensive lessons, your view of humanity will likely never be quite
the same afterwards. The fact that the guy crashed and burned gives me no
comfort at all.

Even so, I _do_ realize I had a part in that, if I had been a little bit
smarter I could have educated myself on this stuff before accepting. And
that's where the world today is different than in the past: we now have world-
wide networks of people in tech that can warn each other. So every story like
the one you told here should help to keep other technical people safe from
predatory behavior.

I wrote about my experience here:

[https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-start-up-from-
hell](https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-start-up-from-hell)

Apologies for the pictures not working, I still need to fix that after the
latest domain shuffle.

~~~
noir_lord
> I've had something similar to this happen early in my career, it took two
> years out of my life and cost me what I thought was a good personal
> relationship but which turned out to be just predatory in retrospect.

That is so damn close to me that it was eerie reading it.

I think quite often programmers who are good but early in their careers don't
value themselves enough and the relationship ends up been exploitative.

I worked 80hr weeks for just slightly under 2 years for someone I thought was
a both a friend and a boss for it all to go sideways.

The lesson was learnt on the spot and while I'm still gregarious these days I
operate by the maxim "trust but verify".

~~~
jacquesm
I used to work for nothing if the work was interesting enough. Bad mistake.

> I worked 80hr weeks for just slightly under 2 years for someone I thought
> was a both a friend and a boss for it all to go sideways.

That is really very familiar.

> The lesson was learnt on the spot and while I'm still gregarious these days
> I operate by the maxim "trust but verify".

Good for you. And make sure you pass the lesson on to others so they don't
have to learn it the hard way.

~~~
noir_lord
> Good for you. And make sure you pass the lesson on to others so they don't
> have to learn it the hard way.

Already did that, I worked at a place where I was the 5th programmer on the
team but the most experienced and the lead, the boss was not a nice guy and
worked the two youngest programmers like dogs, I soon put a stop to that with
the "If you don't turn your computers off, I'm going to go flip the breaker,
it's 6pm on a Friday _go home_ ".

The thing I've learnt with bosses like that is most of the time if you stand
up to them they either back down, respect you for it or fire you at some point
in the future (assuming you haven't already left) but in any case your life
improves.

The last job I had for someone I came in at 8:30am, left at 5:30pm and outside
of work I didn't answer calls, emails or issues unless I was on call, this was
despite the pressure to do so that many of the other programmers succumbed to.

Team pressure is a hard thing to fight against but I've seen enough to know
that a team working (actually working, not screwing around on a computer all
day) 12 hour days 6 days a week can do that for a month at most and then the
damage sets in and each day is less productive till you end up getting less
done in 12 hours than your team would normally get done in 6.

Tired people don't do good work.

------
brazzledazzle
I went through a long drawn out sales engagement with them. It seemed like a
cool product at its core (basically a sort of meshed set of interconnected
nodes that you could do live "natural language" queries against predefined
collected data (i.e. "what machines are running ntpd?") but the stuff they
were trying to sell on top of it at the time like patch management ranged from
half finished to promises for future releases to things that ended up
simply... not being true.

My perception at the time was that it was a good product for what it did but
maybe after the demos were over too many potential customers said "so now
what?" and they were putting pressure on engineering to release way too soon.
And it turns out they were probably right, even though it was an obviously
useful product for live reporting, detection and triage those things aren't
appealing to managers so we didn't buy it.

~~~
tptacek
So... osquery?

~~~
jonstewart
It supposedly has some kind of peer-to-peer topology for executing queries and
aggregating the responses, so--I believe, I'm not certain--it avoids having a
centralized data store that gets DDOS'd from the agents or a linear machine-
by-machine connect-and-query model. That allows it to scale to large networks.
The company _definitely_ benefited from the a16z lead-gen (and investment).
Tanium was the big shiny endpoint tech of 2016, but I'm not convinced they
have a good handle on the use cases/domain.

------
mvpu
I'm getting sick of reports like this. Setting up unfair vesting schedules and
firing people before their stock vests... somebody should vigorously
investigate it and put the CEO in jail. Startups are fucking hard work and a
CEO stealing glory is a crime not a culture issue. These guys need fear of
God.

~~~
posguy
Its just another form of indenturing workers, by holding these ballooning
stock vesting schedules over their heads in the uneven employer/employee
relationship. The employer gets stability from the employee, while being able
to fire the employee after a few years just before they vest, saving the
company $$$ and maintaining control for the current shareholders.

~~~
jacquesm
> while being able to fire the employee after a few years just before they
> vest

Never ever agree to a vesting schedule where it takes longer than a year to
get your stock. 1 year cliff maximum.

~~~
posguy
Yeah, a fair vesting schedule should evenly vest as you work, ideally as often
as possible (eg: every month or week). Its akin to compounding, as a savings
account holder you want the interest on your account to compound as often as
possible.

~~~
LoSboccacc
to keep it to the point it should come month by month along with the standard
compensation, since you take a pay cut in exchange for stock it's only fair to
have it delivered month by month, at most with a clause that after x year the
stock trickle stops and you get an equivalent increase in your pay

sadly there's plenty sucker willing to gift their work away so any hint of
people having a clue about the risks in cliffed vesting become unhirable
troublemakers in most startups

~~~
jacquesm
That will only happen if techies/employees all over a region band together and
don't let themselves be pushed into some kind of prisoners dilemma.

~~~
user5994461
It's already happening. Anyone who's worked at a startup before and has been
burnt is unlikely to accept the vesting and the work conditions. That's in
part why it's to hard for companies to recruit experienced tech workers.

At the same time, there is an endless stream of young people willing to break
into the industry at any costs.

The age and experience of people in a place tells you a lot about what the
company really value.

------
jacquesm
Whoever thought that calling 'Orions List' 'Schindlers List' was clever has no
idea what Schindlers List was all about.

> The situation at Tanium underscores the risk of venture capitalists placing
> near-absolute power in the hands of a company’s creators.

That sentence does not make sense to me. It is a rule rather than an exception
that VCs end up with minority shareholdings but usually favorable terms in
case of liquidation. They don't 'place near-absolute power in the ands of a
company's creators', they're simply later to the table and have
correspondingly fewer shares bought at a significant premium.

The original founders call the shots and only if they dilute to the point that
outside capital holds a majority does the equation change and even then there
might still be different classes of shares to deal with.

For the most part VCs are along for the ride, they can make noise and they can
try to win over the board but as long as the founders have 51% or more they
call the shots.

~~~
bobsil1
The key is board majority, not common shares majority. Because board can
change the rules.

~~~
jacquesm
The board does not change the shareholder agreement nor does the board change
anything else to do with the shares. What the board can do - and will do - is
fire the CEO if they are of the opinion the CEO is not functioning well, but
if the CEO is also a shareholder and has majority control of the stock (or the
confidence of the majority of the shareholders) he/she can call a shareholder
meeting, get rid of the board and re-instate himself or herself.

Boards are not active at the level of shareholders, though many boards do have
major shareholders as board members.

~~~
bobsil1
The board can change the bylaws, issue new shares to get a majority of each
class, wash out founders with a forward and reverse split. Preferred shares
have all kinds of rights not given to founders. 50.1% of shares outstanding
means nothing by itself.

------
sheeshkebab
This sums up nicely why working for someone else's dream (the dipshit Orion's
in this case) is a bad idea.

------
calcsam
After raising a Series B of $90 million, new employees would be getting
probably, at most, 0.05% over four years, or vesting around 0.01% on their
one-year cliff.

I can't imagine how the founders thought that firing tens of key employees in
order to retain an extra fraction of a percentage point made financial sense.

------
abalone
_> One of the most unnerving aspects of life at Tanium is what’s known
internally as Orion’s List. The CEO allegedly kept a close eye on which
employees would soon be eligible to take sizable chunks of stock. For those he
could stand to do without, Hindawi ordered the workers to be fired... which
would help Hindawi defend his ownership by limiting the number of
stakeholders..._

The suggests one of two things: Either Tanium has a _really strange_ vesting
schedule or Bloomberg blew the reporting here.

The typical vesting schedule is distributed over four years with a one year
cliff. That means, with typical vesting, only <1 year old employees could
possibly be on this list. Furthermore, only 25% of their grant would be at
stake. With Tanium being a relatively mature $3.7B startup, we can infer that
the typical grant size at this stage would not constitute more than a small
fraction of a percent, even for fairly senior positions -- and we're talking
25% of that.

It thus is highly unlikely that firing right before the cliff would retain
"sizable chunks of stock" big enough to materially affect the CEO's ownership.
It's entirely possible that a List exists, but the stated motivation doesn't
add up. Bloomberg should really follow up here with details on the vesting
schedule.

------
leroy_masochist
Isn't a father-mother-son leadership team a massive red flag when choosing
what company to work for? I mean, whether it's a car dealership or a tech
startup, when you have family pride all mixed up in company culture it really
tends to be a shitty place to work.

If anyone has any examples of where this type of setup has actually worked out
well, would love to know of one.

~~~
notacoward
There's a funny thing about that. Quite a few companies have been financially
successful with that model, but a disproportionate number of them seem to be
morally challenged. One of the first lists I was able to find included Wal-
Mart, Cargill, and Koch as three of the top four. Price fixing, influence
peddling, and several examples of private profit at public expense. I kind of
don't care how much money they make, or how much I might make by going there.
I still wouldn't touch them with a ten-foot pole.

------
bertlequant
The father goes around apologizing for his son's behavior? I'm pretty sure
that's not helping anyone.

------
metaphorm
yet another sorry story of a man being driven to the brink of madness by the
greed monster.

------
anon42387
Where is the evidence? Where are the quotes by previous employees making this
claim? These employees were fired because they were failing to do their job.
If you are running a company will sit aside and do nothing and continue to let
anyone stay in the company that proved to miss their target repetitively?
These claims are 100% false. This story is not only poorly written but it is
full of false information crafted only for click bait. It's sad that I can no
longer feel as though Bloomberg is a creditable source of news.

~~~
diminoten
If you've got contradictory information you're willing to share, it would be
interesting to hear about it.

~~~
anon42387
[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/working-tanium-stacey-
ruesch-...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/working-tanium-stacey-ruesch-sphr-
ryt)

