Lady Macbeth

I Love the Smell of Settlement in the Morning: Skype Founders Set to Get 10 Percent, Option to Buy Three Percent More and Two Board Seats

Kara Swisher in News on November 4, 2009 at 11:38 pm PT

According to several sources close to the situation, barring any unforeseen delay, a deal to settle the Skype imbroglio is likely to be announced around the time the markets open tomorrow. While the massive agreement–which will settle a series of lawsuits waged by Skype’s co-founders–is not yet officially signed, sources said lawyers are apparently putting the finishing touches on the paperwork. Sources also said that those co-founders–Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis–will get 10 percent of Skype back for rights to key technology they control, an option to pay $83 million for another three percent of the Internet telephony service and two seats on the 23-member board.

The Curious Case of Facebook's Benjamin Ling and Sheryl Sandberg

Kara Swisher in News on August 18, 2008 at 6:15 pm PT

Here’s one certainty in the hubbub that has resulted in the wake of the departure of high-profile exec Ben Ling from Facebook last week: COO Sheryl Sandberg is definitely not responsible for the melting of the polar ice caps. That’s the joking question–Was global warming Sandberg’s fault too?–that was asked at a staff meeting at the social networking start-up last Friday afternoon, after the news of Ling’s departure, on the heels of some other previous employee exits, suddenly morphed into a series of increasingly vituperative posts on the Valleywag tech gossip site that all centered on what blogger Owen Thomas called Sandberg’s “reign of terror” at Facebook. The truth of the situation, though, is actually a lot more interesting.