So 1/1 is correct. Are you implying that all of the rest of them have no issues? I bet Zynga employees are pretty thrilled with their stock packages that were taken away right now, just as Facebook employees are presumably thrilled that the "$60-80/share" stock package their recruiter had promised them is now in the sub 20/share range. But hey, thats just 3 examples, and there are hundreds of companies right?

Okay, how about last startup I worked for? Director of Operations hooks up with a subordinate, tries to promote them, someone else points out this is messed up, Director of Operations vows revenge, starts witch hunt, spends over 100k on consulting and salary for the employee they hooked up with, who should have been fired. In the end, when everyone realized what the person, he had already moved on to swanky new job. Karma is not a thing.

What? Not having your company's stock perform as well as you wish (or what the recruiter told you, which everyone takes with a grain of salt anyways) is nowhere near examples see in that court filing. Not remotely close. Putting what looks to be serious abuse in the workplace alongside stock underperformance as "issues" is absurdly disingenuous.

I know plenty of folks who work at a wide variety of companies in the Bay Area and have heard of nothing remotely as crazy as what is being reported at Color, so yes, I do believe this sort of thing is relatively isolated.

I mean, if "this type of thing"=someone bringing a gun to work and your children getting threatened, I obviously agree. My point was more that there is a pretty discernable pattern of people acting like terrible human beings when they run a startup and see dollar signs in the future.

ps. I think the whole "which you can take with a grain of salt" statement says it all. These companies employ these people and ask them to sell the company by saying thing x, y or z. If those things they made up to get you to leave a job are complete bullshit, its not just like "oh well, silly me trusting a recruiter" it should be "wow those guys at Facebook are kind of scumbags for misleading me and promising me x while giving me y while our CEO is now one of the richest people on earth." Cool.

I did not imply that the rest don't have any issues. But for one or a few incidents do not make Silicon Valley.

I've been in Silicon Valley for 4 years. I've met and known people who I would not want to be friends with let alone be associated with.

But overwhelmingly, Silicon Valley is full of good people who tried to do the right thing which is why it still continues to thrive.

There seem to be plenty of awful CEOs here, particularly among the generation who first sold companies during the .com boom.

For all the talk about how it's important to have a strong, engineering-centric founding team, there is a lot of money going into dubious startups here run by non-technical founders who seem to be just doing the CEO / "startup" thing more for the image, delegating as much as possible so they can leave early to cart their kids around and go to concerts with their buddies.

Obviously Nguyen sounds like a particularly atrocious example, but it doesn't surprise me at all that someone like him thrives in this environment.

Although my thoughts are rooted in the immediacy of this article, it's a trend I've noticed over the last couple of years. As another has pointed out, it's not quite as meritocratic as I thought it was.

People were falling over themselves to sing the praises of Color when it came out.

I do not remember this. People were shocked at how useless it was and how much money was sunk into it.

I meant when the news of Color came out.

Praises? Color was vilified in the Valley because of their excessive funding.

Care to show proof of people praising Color?

The vilification was a response to the fountains of praise before it launched. I didn't think to keep links handy.

Praise before it launched? Can you mention what they praised about Color?

I live in Silicon Valley and plugged in to the startup community.

I don't know anybody who praised Color.

Their app on both Android and iOS was horrible.

Depends perhaps on whether you count the Valley press and venture capitalists as part of the Valley community. Obviously the VCs were praising it: Sequoia and others put a huge pile of cash into Color. And the Valley press was breathless over them too, with TechCrunch publishing this prelaunch article: http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/23/color-looks-to-reinvent-soc...

Sarcasm doesn't translate well on the internet, so I'd make that more obvious. And I do hope you're being sarcastic.