"We had a gap in our diligence process". This is the most bullshit line in the entire statement. Like, you didn't Google top executives of the company you decided to buy (CEO, CTO, CRO) and read the first articles that popped up?
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.
This is good because it shows there are professional consequences to pay when you engage in unethical behavior on behalf of repressive regimes and against democratic foundations.
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.
It is because they need some blockchain analytics provider (in-house or external) for every chain they list as a compliance prerequisite. Chainalysis/Elliptic only have a few available.
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.
What's their connection with Neutrino? Does it just so happen that some ex-members of HackingTeam worked there at that time? Was it founded by ex-HackingTeam people?
> 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.
> 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
The key part: "those who previously worked at Hacking Team (despite the fact that they have no current affiliation with Hacking Team), will transition out"
To earn a living, I suppose they will have to go back to hacking. Maybe they will end up as contractors somewhere in the Middle East, such as Dubai.
Leaving or “transitioned out” are such BS ways to say you fired them. You kicked them to the curb, grow up and state it like someone who believes it was justified.
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."
TLDR: We bought a company but forgot to Google the founders and didn't realize they used to sell spying software to bad people, so now we asked them to leave quietly and don't want to say how much hush money we've paid them. Because values.
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.
Apparently, in the age of the internet your sins follow you forever. Humans are imperfect and do not always make sound decisions or decisions that everyone agrees with. We need to be able to respect this and work together rather than taking away people's livelihood.
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.
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.
Did you pass on this person because of the prior conviction that he chose not to volunteer, or because he flunked the interview and wasn't a good fit for the team?
Did you judge him better or worse because he cut a deal?
More importantly, if we take the implication that he was passed on because he didn't volunteer info to a question you didn't directly ask -- can you really blame him for not volunteering the details?
It’s been more than 15 years and my memory is hazy. The part I remember is recognizing his name.
But I don’t know. We were a company that provided cloud computing services and he had previously plead guilty to computer hacking crimes. With more life experience I wouldn’t hold that against a person today but at the time I probably did. My thinking then was that it was relevant information that he should have disclosed.
Why would you feel they’re required to disclose that information? In eleven states and thirteen cities, it’s even illegal for you to ask as an employer (“ban the box” initiatives), public or private (its drastically more states and cities for only public employers not permitted to ask).
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.
