Wow, two big shots in one day. I can't keep up with all the testosteroned debauchery. They must be minting misogynistic douchebags like ... rabbits? Sorry, I'm at a loss for analogies?
Story #1
CEO’s Abrupt Exit Followed Complaint of Alleged Groping, Other Accounts of Misconduct
CS Disco employees say they had previously complained to company about Kiwi Camara’s behavior with female employees
Kiwi Camara graduated from Harvard Law School at 19 and co-founded a software company at 29.
By Emily Glazer and Theo Francis, WSJ
Sept. 20, 2023
Kiwi Camara, a Harvard Law School prodigy turned technology entrepreneur, drew attention last week when he resigned from software supplier CS Disco walking away from stock options once valued at nearly $110 million.
Current and former employees now say he abruptly quit as chief executive after the small company’s board began investigating allegations that he groped a young female employee.
The alleged incident, at a Sept. 6 dinner with staff, triggered an investigation by outside lawyers, some of the employees said. It came more than a year after a CS Disco employee had made a formal complaint about Camara’s behavior around young female employees, employees said.
Camara, 39 years old, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Camara resigned on Sunday, Sept. 10, a few days after the board opened its investigation into the sexual assault allegation. Camara forfeited an award of stock options that had made him one of the highest paid CEOs of 2022. It was the latest chapter in an unusual career that began when Camara graduated at age 19 from law school.
CS Disco, a niche supplier of software for lawyers, gave little explanation for its leader’s sudden departure, saying it didn’t stem from policy or operational disagreements. Employees said they learned of his exit during a company meeting on the afternoon of Sept. 11, where leaders wished Camara the best on his next chapter.
In a press release that day, venture capitalist Krishna Srinivasan, the board’s chairman and a director since 2013, said: “We are grateful to Kiwi for his vision, passion, and dedication to Disco over the past decade.”
A spokesman for CS Disco referred back to the company’s statements in the press release and a related securities filing. Srinivasan didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The Wall Street Journal spoke with more than a dozen current and former CS Disco employees as well as other people familiar with the matter for this article.
Dinner with staff
Camara co-founded CS Disco in 2013—when he was 29—to develop software used by lawyers to sort through documents. The company hired hundreds of employees, whom Camara called “Discovians,” and the CEO regularly hosted alcohol-fueled social events for them.
On Wednesday, Sept. 6, the CEO participated in a companywide happy hour in a food hall in the Austin, Texas, building that houses the company’s main offices. At the event, Camara was encouraging employees to take shots of tequila.
After the happy hour, Camara invited a small group of employees to dinner at the nearby Peacock Mediterranean Grill. At the restaurant, the drinking continued and Camara pushed roasted meat into the face of one young employee, telling her to eat it “like an animal.”
Camara groped the woman, who was visibly uncomfortable, and tried to coax her to return to his condo, some of the employees said. Employees intervened to stop the CEO and the woman left. The incident was reported by employees to CS Disco’s head of human resources the same night.
The next day, the law firm Cooley opened an investigation on behalf of the board and interviewed people who attended the dinner. It couldn’t be learned what the investigation determined.
Cooley previously did legal work for CS Disco, including advising on its initial public stock offering. Often boards hire independent firms for investigations. A Cooley spokesman declined to comment.
Complaint to ethics hotline
It wasn’t the first time that a CS Disco employee had complained about Camara’s behavior with young female employees.
The CEO hired some female receptionists only after he reviewed photos of them, a practice he didn’t follow for men, according to former employees and a lawsuit filed in federal court in Austin in 2018 by a former CS Disco employee. Part of the suit was dismissed and the parties agreed to dismiss the rest, which alleged age and gender discrimination.
In early 2022, a CS Disco employee contacted the company’s ethics hotline requesting an investigation into Camara’s treatment of young female employees, including how they were hired, social gatherings he hosted and comments he made.
The company’s finance chief and others reviewed the materials. An outside lawyer, also from Cooley, investigated the complaint. It couldn’t be learned what the investigation found.
Several former CS Disco employees said that in recent years they had raised concerns about Camara’s behavior to human resources, top executives and during exit interviews, and that they felt nothing changed.
In February 2022, one employee complained to human resources that the CEO surrounds himself with young female staffers and “prefers to have a house party with associates rather than a professional dinner. This is very inappropriate behavior,” according to a document reviewed by the Journal. It is unclear if the company took any action.
Emerging leader program
In 2022, Camara spearheaded a program at CS Disco called the Emerging Leader Rotational Program, or ELRP. The company would recruit and hire about 40 new college graduates, offering them a roughly $80,000 job where they would spend several years rotating through divisions of the company.
A recent job description for the ELRP states: “Working alongside top legal minds, entrepreneurs, and technologists, you’ll make a meaningful impact while deepening your skills with one-to-one attention from our leaders and coaches.”
Former CS Disco managers familiar with the ELRP said Camara would socialize with the company’s youngest staff. He sought to select young female ELRP associates, they said, to do rotations in the Office of the CEO. Weekend events for ELRP associates such as visits to wineries struck managers as wasteful while executives were urging belt tightening.
The company rented a house in the Northeast for a recruiting trip where Camara could socialize with ELRP candidates and company staff. Camara also discussed with employees renting an Airbnb in Austin when a new class of ELRP associates was arriving so they could all stay together.
“It was so weird,” one former ELRP associate said, “what are we—on Love Island together?”
Camara, who lives in the Austonian, a luxury condominium a block away from CS Disco’s headquarters, would also entertain ELRP associates and other employees at his apartment or an event space atop the skyscraper where he lived.
The former ELRP associate said the boss would strongly encourage his visitors to try his brandy or cognac and smoke cigars with him. Camara generally wasn’t easy to refuse. “He’d say stuff like, ‘I’ll fire you if you don’t do things my way,’ ” this person said.
Skipping high school
Camara was born in the Philippines in 1984 and is the only child of his parents, who were both doctors. The family later moved to Honolulu, where he attended a private school. He left after 8th grade and, at 14, enrolled at Hawaii Pacific University to study computer science. He graduated in two years.
In a 2001 interview with the Honolulu Advertiser, the then-16-year-old Camara said he didn’t feel that different from others around him at the university. His parents told the paper that it was a difficult decision to let him skip high school. “Academics aren’t the only important things you learn in high school,” his father said. “There’s overall character development, social and emotional development.”
Camara enrolled at Harvard Law School at 17. It is also there that he met classmate Joe Sibley on the first day of orientation. Sibley recalled that he was among the older students and Camara, the youngest. “We went on to become best friends,” Sibley said.
In his first year at Harvard, Camara drew criticism for posting course outlines that used a racist term for Black people. The episode was covered by national news outlets. He apologized, saying he couldn’t explain why he used the term, the Harvard Crimson reported.
Camara clerked for a federal judge and later co-founded a small law firm with his Harvard classmate, Camara & Sibley, in Texas. It was there that Camara started work on the technology that became CS Disco. Sibley stuck with the law firm; Camara went into tech startup mode.
“I had enough on my plate just practicing law, and he was still handling a law practice and a law firm, and getting Disco off the ground,” Sibley said. He likened Camara to Elon Musk, “always involved in so many different things because they get bored so easily.”
CS Disco’s software scans documents to help lawyers manage cases, search through millions of digital documents for potential evidence, and other tasks. The company says its software has been used in complicated litigation such as lawsuits over the opioid crisis and the Boeing 737 Max.
When he took the business public in July 2021, Camara wrote a letter to investors where he said: “We are committed to making Disco the kind of place that we would like to tell other people we were involved in building, the kind of place where we would love for our kids to work.”
Kiwi Camara entertained employees at his apartment in the Austonian, a skyscraper in downtown Austin, Texas. PHOTO: GEORGE ROSE/GETTY IMAGES
The shares more than doubled after the IPO, giving CS Disco a peak market capitalization of $3.8 billion in September 2021, according to FactSet. The stock has since slumped and the company is now valued at around $400 million. As of mid April, Camara owned a 7% stake, currently valued at about $28 million.
The company has posted a loss every quarter since it went public. Last year it had a net loss of about $70 million on revenue of $135 million. In January, CS Disco said it would lay off about 9% of its staff.
After Camara’s exit, the company appointed one of its board members, Scott Hill, as interim CEO and set out to proceed without its founder.
At an all-hands meeting on Friday, Sept. 15, one employee asked Hill about sexual assault rumors related to executives. The interim CEO replied that there was a zero-tolerance policy.
—Jim Oberman contributed to this article.
Story #2
Cboe CEO Edward Tilly Resigns Over Personal Relationships With Colleagues
Options exchange names board member Fredric Tomczyk as its new chief executive
By Alexander Osipovich and Dean Seal, WSJ
Updated Sept. 19, 2023
Edward Tilly had been Cboe’s CEO since 2013. PHOTO: BRENDAN MCDERMID/REUTERS
The chief executive and chairman of Cboe Global Markets CBOE 0.20%increase; green up pointing triangle, Edward Tilly, unexpectedly resigned from the options-exchange operator after a board investigation found that he didn’t disclose personal relationships with colleagues.
The Chicago-based company said Tuesday that Tilly’s failure to disclose the relationships violates Cboe’s policies and “stands in stark contrast to the company’s values.”
The investigation that led to Tilly’s resignation was launched in late August and was led by the board and an outside law firm, the Cboe statement said. Tilly’s departure ended his more than three-decade career at the exchange.
A Cboe spokeswoman declined to comment further on the CEO’s exit. Tilly couldn’t be reached for comment.
The resignation of Tilly, 60 years old, is the latest in a series of surprise CEO exits prompted by their personal conduct.
One week ago, BP CEO Bernard Looney resigned abruptly over past relationships with colleagues. In April, NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell departed after an investigation into a complaint of inappropriate conduct.
Cboe shares rose 2.7% to an all-time record close of $155.87. Analysts said the price jump was fueled by speculation that the change in Cboe’s management could lead to an acquisition of the exchange operator. The exchange industry has consolidated heavily in recent years, and Cboe has long been seen as a potential acquisition target.
Its stock is up more than 24% this year as Cboe has benefited from a surge in options trading, driven in part by individual investors using the risky instruments to place bets on stocks.
The company handles nearly one-third of U.S. options trading volume, making it the country’s largest options exchange, according to Cboe data. Cboe also owns a lucrative franchise centered on the VIX volatility index, sometimes called Wall Street’s “fear gauge,” as well as U.S. stock and futures exchanges and trading venues in Europe and Canada.
The Cboe board has tapped one of its members, Fredric Tomczyk, to succeed Tilly as CEO, effective immediately. From 2008 to 2016, Tomczyk was president and CEO of the parent company of brokerage TD Ameritrade.
William Farrow III, the Cboe board’s lead director, has been named nonexecutive chairman.
Cboe said Tilly’s conduct wasn’t related to and doesn’t impact the company’s strategy, financial performance or operations.
Tilly had been Cboe’s CEO since 2013. A native of the Chicago area, he started out as a clerk on Cboe’s trading floor in 1987 and flourished in the rowdy environment of the floor, where traders jostled and shouted in the pits.
As he rose through the ranks, Tilly helped lead Cboe through the electronification of U.S. financial markets. Cboe still retains a trading floor in Chicago, although it has far fewer traders than it did during the 1980s, and it has a hybrid system in which orders can be executed both electronically and via open outcry.
Write to Alexander Osipovich at alexo@wsj.com and Dean Seal at
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