SiliconBeat

How long would Ken Klein (pictured), the chief executive at Wind River Systems, stick around should the Alameda supplier of embedded software become a division of the world’s largest chip maker? No one can say for sure, but two years would seem to be a relatively safe bet. That’s how long Klein needs to remain with the company in order to receive all of a $5 million retention bonus promised him as part of the merger agreement with Intel, which offered to buy Wind River last week for $11.50 a share in a deal it valued at $884 million.

Details of Klein’s hiring agreement were filed Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission along with Read the rest of this entry »

Novellus Systems said Wednesday that Chief Executive Richard Hill will begin getting paid a base salary equal to 90 percent of his reported 2008 base salary, which was $878,000, according to the company’s last proxy, making his new base salary $790,200. Divided by 12, that amounts to about $65,850 a month.

But the reduction is effectively a raise, given that Read the rest of this entry »

Aryx Therapeutics, the the Fremont biopharmaceutical whose shares were slammed last July when Procter & Gamble pulled out of a partnership in developing Aryx’s drug to treat chronic constipation and abdominal pain, filed its proxy today ahead of its May 20 annual meeting.

In February 2008 the board’s compensation committee established Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, Silicon Image doled out 450,000 stock options divided among  four executive and, in an unconventional twist, vesting on the lion’s share of the awards won’t take place until the fourth year, according to a regulatory filing Tuesday.

Ten percent of the restricted stock will vest on Read the rest of this entry »

Given the number of Silicon Valley executives seeing their salaries cut recently, it may comfort s0me C-level leaders to know that at least one CEO, CyberSource’s William McKiernan, is getting a pretty fat raise.

According to a filing the company made Monday, the compensation committee of CyberSource’s board of directors pushed McKiernan’s pay up by $80,0000 to Read the rest of this entry »

Somewhat lost among the news about Google’s first sales decline ever in its 2009 first quarter and the decision of the company’s first salesman, Omid Kordestani to step down — he’ll continue on as an advisor to the company’s chief executive and co-founders — was news of the filing of an amendment to the company’s innovative “Transferable Stock Option” program.

The program, first unveiled in April 2007, was designed to let workers auction off their Read the rest of this entry »

Spansion, the Sunnyvale flash memory maker that gave its executives a retention-based pay raise in February the same day it fired 3,000 workers, said this week that one of those raises doesn’t seem to have had the desired effect.

The company revealed in a regulatory filing Thursday that one of the recipients of those executive retention pay raises quit a week ago. Dario Sacomani (pictured), the company’s now former chief financial officer, resigned April 10, when he and Spansion entered into a “Personal Leave Agreement” under which Read the rest of this entry »

The three top executives at Electronics for Imaging have volunteered to have their salaries cut “in support of the Company’s cost reduction activities due to deteriorating global economic and industry conditions,” the company said in a filing today that also included a preliminary look at earnings for its just completed first quarter.

The company sees sales coming in between Read the rest of this entry »

If you have an employee who may be contemplating leaving, is promising him more in severance should that happen the most effective way to deal with the situation? That appears to be what happened last week when eHealth, the Mountain View online life insurance provider, reached a “retention” agreement with its chief executive, Gary Lauer.

When he was first hired in 1999, Lauer’s termination benefits called for Read the rest of this entry »

Oracle shareholders got a pleasant surprise this week when the Redwood City software giant said it would begin paying its first ever dividend. One shareholder in particular was no doubt especially pleased, though probably not surprised: Oracle founder and chief executive, Larry  Ellison, who sits on the board and is also its largest stockholder.

When his company makes its first quarterly dividend payment of 5 cents per share on May 8, Ellison’s payment will amount to Read the rest of this entry »