Yeah. Probably because he had 2% of the options, and they wanted to claw it back from him.
I don’t think firing gets rid of vested options, right?
Right, but OP said he was fired before he had options vested.
So he took 2% options at a 50% pay cut, but then got fired and that screwed him out of the 2% options before he could vest.
Welcome to the valley.
Ugh, I shouldn't post while 1/2 awake on 12 hour flights. PagerDuty fired me before I was vested. I was 1/2 evangelist, and 1/2 "DevOps" but took the 50% pay cut so that I could focus more on evangelism, I don't really like tech work anymore, I don't feel like my contribution is significant enough just being a grunt. During AWS Re:invent I signed us some major customers, but we had a bad outage, so they fired me for the AWS outage. Really. I think it was an excuse, and pg, or some other YC advisor told them to fire me and take back the stock options. After I pointed out how jacked up this was, they offered to bring me back as a contract evangelist, but I hold grudges.