May 28, 2014

Adchemy Murthy Nukala We recently told you about the anger among former employees of Adchemy, a California adtech startup recently acquired by @WalmartLabs , the digital marketing unit of Walmart. The former staff are mad because Walmart reportedly bought the company for $30-$40 million, far below the $120 million in total that investors had put into it. (Walmart has previously said that deal price is inaccurate. ) This has left all employees' stock options worth zero dollars — even though many employees had bought common stock in Adchemy with their own money. Sources told us that some staff, after working at Adchemy for years, had bought "six figures" of Adchemy stock with their own cash. Now those shares are worthless. All the money in the deal went to investors, who held preferred shares, and even those investors received only a fraction of what they had put in. So it would seem that in this deal, everybody loses. Well, not everybody. This section of the deal's closing documents, sent to Business Insider by a source who was allowed to view it, show that six top executives including Adchemy CEO Murthy Nukala all did well in the deal. Nukala will get $2.4 million in total golden parachute compensation. Three executives will get $1.9 million. Two others will get $1.1 million and $780,000, respectively. The payments are all multiples of their regular salaries at Adchemy: Business Insider It is, of course, not uncommon for managers to get larger rewards than their employees when they sell their companies. The issue here is that Adchemy employees (and investors) lost their own cash in the company's stock, but their bosses have been given extra compensation in the deal. We asked Walmart and Nukala for comment but did not immediately hear back.