I worked for this company (Good Technology) from July 2012 until Jan 2015 in their San Diego office.
I never exercised my options (they clearly weren't worth the strike price I had as a late joining employee at any time that I had vested shares) so no skin off my back, though I do know people who got screwed by exercising options because they left the company prior to the sale to Blackberry and were essentially forced to exercise the shares or just lose them. (I'm all for the trend pushing for much longer windows on this).
I also know a lot of people who came from companies this company aquired who stuck around for the eventual big payout that was much bandied about by much of the C-level management the entire time I was there who basically traded years of sweat equity for nothing (better than walking away in the hole, though!)
I found the article to be a pretty fair writeup of the events and a useful warning to people on the risks of stock exercising prior to liquidity events. This is a lesson I learned the hard way years ago (first dotcom boom), so I didn't get burned this time, and actually really enjoyed my time working for this company because the team in San Diego (which was pretty well isolated from the teams at the Sunnyvale headquarters) was a great group of people to work with, and I was paid pretty decently.
I never exercised my options (they clearly weren't worth the strike price I had as a late joining employee at any time that I had vested shares) so no skin off my back, though I do know people who got screwed by exercising options because they left the company prior to the sale to Blackberry and were essentially forced to exercise the shares or just lose them. (I'm all for the trend pushing for much longer windows on this).
I also know a lot of people who came from companies this company aquired who stuck around for the eventual big payout that was much bandied about by much of the C-level management the entire time I was there who basically traded years of sweat equity for nothing (better than walking away in the hole, though!)
I found the article to be a pretty fair writeup of the events and a useful warning to people on the risks of stock exercising prior to liquidity events. This is a lesson I learned the hard way years ago (first dotcom boom), so I didn't get burned this time, and actually really enjoyed my time working for this company because the team in San Diego (which was pretty well isolated from the teams at the Sunnyvale headquarters) was a great group of people to work with, and I was paid pretty decently.