[dragonwriter]

> Personally, I think it's very fishy that a company would be allowed to sell a non-employee shares that they can't resell to someone else

OP explicitly says they were an employee and had to exercise options when (implicitly, immediately before) they left not to lose them, so this isn’t an issue of sale to a non-employee.

[givemeethekeys]

When they left, they had a certain amount of time to exercise. So, it needn't be that they were still with the company when they exercised the options.