TL;DR: I think everyone is massively underestimating how much Billy has to lose here. The developers signed away a weekend of work for a 0.4% stake. Billy signe

TL;DR: I think everyone is massively underestimating how much Billy has to lose here. The developers signed away a weekend of work for a 0.4% stake. Billy signed away some undefinable chunk of 18 MONTHS of biz dev for a 0.4% stake! If Billy gets their code, then they compete against Billy using his client list, his price lists, etc. because those were exposed during the weekend.* And, it's not like Billy has super exclusive access to the restaurant business. They could partner with other restaurant owners in the region who are similarly turned off by people like Billy. I'm sure those people exist, given the homophobic and generally condescending comments on display here... So, Billy has: a code base he cannot easily iterate on because he's fucked over his entire potential employee base. Developers have: * A lot of Billy's biz dev work over the past 8 months. * The freedom to exploit personality conflicts in the local/regional business scene to score additional business partners. * Far lower costs. There are probably tons of bugs in a weekend code sprint product, and Billy isn't going to find any free labor to clean those up. Remember a big chunk of software dev is extending and debugging existing code... Billy ain't going nowhere with a static code base. * Worst case, the "fuck you" factor and access to free skilled labor (their own) necessary to make break-even or even loss leader pricing structures. This is a unique advantage in their negotiations with Billy. The last two together would totally screw over Billy. Imagine these developers going into a meeting and demonstrating security flaws or bad GUI glitches in Billy's product during a live meeting... the client might not go with these guys, but in the VERY BEST case for Billy, he's got to hire a freelance developer to clean up the code base. Not going to be able to exploit a hackathon for that sort of stuff, and 80% of software developer is maintenance... * Maybe Billy claims they only get access to his work done that weekend. But that's bullshit; they developers didn't teach themselves to create rather specific types of products in a weekend... to the extent that there's any contract there, if it came out during the weekend, then it counts toward the agreement.