> Being generous and parting on good terms is desirable
The desirable part might be what happens to the morale of the rest of the team.
A possibly vindictive boss is going to be on the mind for everyone who is still there and delivering value - you also risk dividing your team's opinions on this topic ("so unfair" vs "good riddance").
As with a lot of startups with a handful of employees, often what an employee thinks they are getting is some percentage of "possibly nothing" & the person might also have come to the same conclusion before underperforming.
So you might be getting some brownie points with the team, the person getting thinks they're getting nothing of value(but not that you're yanking it out of their hands) and the cap table is not going to be affected anymore than hiring someone & them booking it out on the first vest, which happens.
Agreed with this. Everyone knows when he vests. You will lose the trust of others if you are seen to be doing this only now so that you can avoid giving him some other component of what he has earned.
I don't understand this point of view. Stock/options are given when an employee works satisfactorily through the date of vesting. That's part of the terms of the deal. Why do you get to decide that a certain period of time before that date, counts as "unfair" if you quit or get fired?
People get to decide because you can't stop them from doing so. There's plenty of situations in life where being right and having a positive relationship come into tension. Invoking the "terms of the deal" usually has a cost, relationally—to the point that choosing positive relationship may be less costly overall.
The person you're responding to doesn't seem to be the founder who wrote the ask HN. Also, the phrase "you're full of bad takes today" seems to be against the site guidelines.
At present he hasn’t been fired and if his date of vesting wasn’t approaching, OPs question may not even have arisen in his mind.
Since terminating him is a question related directly to his vesting, everyone is going to know he was let go right before vesting to eek out the best possible value from him right before he gets something he’s worked a year to receive.
“Yeah but our contract says” is literally the worst thing you can do with a small company if you want morale to be high.
Learn from the experience and how you can identify, investigate, address and correct future pivots like theirs. Don't let them become the wrong kind of example for how you do business.
Being generous and parting on good terms is desirable, even when they suck. Even moreso on a small team.