Living up to our values and the Neutrino acquisition

And in real business we spend up to millions in external legal advice to audit and enhance our compliance officers work. I am amazed that in this sector even the advisors don't seem to have M&A experience. This is basic vetting, or... a calculated risk with the expected outcome.

Laughably so

The reality is that Coinbase through their due diligence process had to have known about these ties and how they may have been perceived by the media/crypto community and yet proceeded to buy it anyway because they are desperate to list new tokens to shore up declining revenue.

The deal was already signed...Coinbase can't just back out because they miscalculated the backlash despite the background of the founders being well known. The acquired team probably just gets to vest immediately and leave Coinbase without having to work for them.

If they had Neutrino shares they still likely made money with the exit to Coinbase; and now they don't even need to stick around.

Wikipedia explains it well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Team

HackingTeam is a Milan-based information technology company that sells offensive intrusion and surveillance capabilities to governments, law enforcement agencies and corporations. Its "Remote Control Systems" enable governments and corporations to monitor the communications of internet users, decipher their encrypted files and emails, record Skype and other Voice over IP communications, and remotely activate microphones and camera on target computers. The company has been criticized for providing these capabilities to governments with poor human rights records, though HackingTeam states that they have the ability to disable their software if it is used unethically.

From https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/04/neutrino-employees-who-onc...:

> Before launching Neutrino, CEO Giancarlo Russo, CTO Alberto Ornaghi and chief research officer Marco Valleri, worked at Hacking Team, a security and surveillance tech company that has been criticized for selling products to governments with a history of human rights violations, including Egypt, Kazakhstan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Turkey. As The Intercept reported in 2015, Hacking Team’s malware has also been found on the computers of activists and journalists.

Coinbase bought Neutrino and were massively criticized for it.

Seems totally silly to me. Neutrino provides forensic accounting that is much needed in the crypto space in order to stabilize it and utilize the verifiability that makes blockchain so important.

Hackingteam provided a service that someoneelse would have done if not themselves.

they seem to be the smartest guys around.

I hope they get a good severance package and are free to form their next company without contractual limitations.

Coinbase was more solid with them on board, but oh well... gotta appease users and play the PR game

Actually, I'm interpreting it as "we're making this purposely ambiguous because we actually negotiated a sweetheart exit deal that allows them to continue vesting stock without working or staying on as a paid advisor/consultant."

More realistically: we bought a company even though we knew full well the founders sold spy software, now that it probably becoming clear that Saudi Arabia used it for murder, we think it's best that said founders leave quietly with a good exit package because values.

And helping regimes like Saudi Arabia oppress their people was definitely a sin. I'm okay with these individuals losing their jobs. It should give them time to rehabilitate themselves if they so choose.

In the early 2000s I worked for an early cloud company. We interviewed someone whose name I recognized as someone associated with a very well known person that had been convicted for computer crimes, and that this someone had testified to avoid prosecution himself. (Edit: he had plead guilty.)

Despite the someone’s recognizeable name, at no point did he disclose this aspect of his past. We decided to pass on him.

This team sold tools to help people take others' lives and livelihoods, to people known to do so. How long should the consequences follow them? For what reason should anyone else give them a "reset"? There's no evidence that I can find that they even expressed regret about what they were doing, just moved on to a new scam. Coinbase is late but right to fire them.