Here are the historical facts I could gather that will help me try to understand this:
Jamila Gordon joined the group 12 months ago when they had very little USA presence and she has very little USA experience
The company has since announced a mega deal which is completely USA focused and will take up a lot of technical bandwidth and resourcing on the US timezone. She may have not wanted to move?
The company has expanded in leaps and bounds in the past 12 months especially in the US and I see online that they are advertising for more and more jobs in the USA
I spoke to someone at the company and the team in the USA has now trippled in size compared to the Australian team which gives you another indicator of the global growth focus. A lot of aussie companies stay in Australia for too long IMO.
The annual general meeting (AGM) is set for late November this year and every year 1 of the directors has to be voted to step down as a director. This is an annual requirement with ASX
My Analysis:
So to me this looks like Jamila Gordon is saving face ahead of being the voted off as perhaps the weakest link on the board (Macdonald, Hunter are nailing it and Brett Eagle is a corporate lawyer with both AUS and USA commercial experience),
I think she also saw the writing on the wall also with Navesh Pillar from Telstra joining the advisory board a month ago, as well as now that the company is expanding so aggressively in the USA with mega US deals that some key technical US staff as per the rumor on this forum might be in the runnng to be announced as global CTOs to now take this aggressively growing company to the next level.
The fact that she may be forfeiting the options that she was just assigned tells me she wants to bow out gracefully as she probably wouldn’t have vested those options in full anyway being voted of the board in 10 days time by the shareholders. So these types of execs are very good at risk reward ratios.
She might have been pushed to step down due to USA focus and this was a classy way for the company to honor her departure gracefully
In business and especially high level executives, it’s all about saving face otherwise they run the risk of staying at the top of their game and not being employed at the same levels again
As I’m typing and analysing this I am actually getting excited about this news as we are starting to see glimpses that GSW is no longer an Australian tech player and is aggressively making the right moves to become a dominant global force in this space. Just like what happened at Facebook and every big high growth tech story - not everyone can scale themselves as fast as the company is scaling
GSW Price at posting:
$2.13 Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
