MarkL's declaration

Wow… one of the first things I saw when I got back from vacation was Mark Lucovsky’s comment on my last post. I searched around a bit and found that John Battelle has been covering the story as well.

When I read the comment and the other stories about the filling, I was floored. It seems like quite an irrational response. If someone wants to leave a company and explore new opportunities, there should be no hard feelings. From another perspective: there’s no real advantage to keeping someone on a team who doesn’t really have his/her heart in it. The employee may be a superstar like Mark and you may really want to keep him around, but you’ve got to let him follow his passions wherever they may be – even if it’s at a competing company.

After all, a career is very personal and many factors go into it; I know that Mark considered his ambitions, family, technology passions, and more when making his decision leave Microsoft for Google.

I trust Mark’s declaration is pretty accurate regarding the actual events, he’s a good guy and extremely smart. After all, it’s a sworn declaration – not something he’d take lightly.

By the way, anyone else notice Kai Fu’s compensation package in the filings? $2.5m signing bonus, $1.5m 1 year retention bonus, $250k annual salary, 10k options, and a 20k share stock grant. Plus a new car, kids education paid for, and $16k a month for housing and “hardship” expenses? That’s egregious!

…but of course, if a company offered me that kind of compensation, I’d take it in a heartbeat

P.S. Anyone have a link to the filed court documents? I’d love to read through them.