What happens when a top executive at a startup goes to work for the big company that acquired it? Usually, the executive stays long enough to get their cash and then bolts. Sometimes, that executive stays for years and ultimately gets so disgusted with how the new owner is ruining their startup, that they leave and start a new company aimed at all those flaws.
This comes to mind in considering the career of Eric Yuan. As he explained in a September 21 interview, he left Beijing in 1997 to be the founding engineering of WebEx. Cisco Systems bought the video conferencing company in 2007 for $3.2 billion and Yuan stuck around Cisco as a VP in its Collaborative Systems group.
