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I think Alman's emotional arguments were a bit misplaced and while I disagreed with, at the time, how they were made, he seems to be fairly correct. Here is my

I think Alman's emotional arguments were a bit misplaced and while I disagreed with, at the time, how they were made, he seems to be fairly correct. Here is my interpretation of why: > What precisely is wrong with Jeremy Guillory's case? It isn't that there was anything wrong with it, but if you see Alman's post, they were in the preliminary stages of the company and I think jointly applied to YC. if IIRC they didn't even both do through YC together. Let's say you and I talk about doing a lemonade stand. We apply to Techstars as Junicorn bespoke lemonade purveyors. Unfortunately, I want to use tensor flow & the latest stanford NLP techniques for our lemonade startup and build it on blockchain technology using go. You wanted to do some anachronistic throwback where the Lemonade POS system is built on nodeJS with gulp & browserfy having it be mobile-first, cloud based omnichannel. So we have the break up. Then I, and my new founders build an entire company based on Lemonade stands & blockchain technology. Going throug techstars with an entirely different group of people and taking the idea all the way from an idea into a product. Again for a timeline recap: 1. We both had the same idea independently. 2. Then we tried to combine our ideas. 3. Then we went our seperate ways to work on our own seperate implementation. 4. Then my team and I built Junicorn: Summer Lemonade and sold to MinuteMaid for our Concentration technology. (this is like thousands of steps you weren't part of) 5. Then you ask for some large number payoff because we both discussed starting a company but ultimately didn't. However, depending on the legal structure and some of the other factors (e.g. massive leverage before a sale) he was probably able to make some money. He may have even contributed to the company in a way that entitled him to something. It was just pretty shitty to bring that up during a massive sale like this.

nihonde 10y ago
In the scenario that you describe, you muddied the waters of Junicorn without properly cleaning up your mess during the breakup. That opens you up to claims like these, which is probably why this happened at Cruise. As soon as you have an adverse relationship to a business partner, it's time to cut bait, get releases signed, or do something completely unrelated.
- vonklaus 10y ago
  correct. The reason I believe that this was shitty was timing. The lawsuit coincided with the GM deal by all public accounts. Regardless of the legal structure, this was a shitty thing to do. Clearly, he cofounded Cruise and probably did contribute at least to the zeitgeist of the project. Obviously, a cliff is standard for founders and kyle (based on the application) had posted a personal 100k convertible note. so if he fired Jeremy, that's fine. Jeremy probably would be entitled to something, and it should have been spelled out. However claiming 50% 2 years later to coincide with a 1B exit, seems fucked up. The approach to this, is what I have issues with.
saltwrong 10y ago
If you read the legal documents, instead of Sam's attempt to try the case in the media, you'll see it's quite clear. There are signed documents stating Guillory owned half the equity. These documents were in YC's possession. Nothing ever voided them. Instead of separating Guillory early and cleanly, they dropped the ball, and attempted to shame him, attempted to threaten him (Sam called Guillory dozens of times in a single weekend and told him to take a small buyout or he'd never work again), and then only as a final result did the thing they should've done out of the gate: negotiate a settlement.
- vonklaus 10y ago
  If true, is this professional? No. However, OJ Simpson wasn't found guilty, using a technicality to escape justice. So while the legal system is helpful and i wouldn't consider it a total piece of shit, I think if I built a 1 billion dollar company and someone asked for $500M, because I forgot to file some paperwork due to the quickie shotgun starter-marriage we rushed into I would probably flip the fuck out. Also, it's like in the social network where "Mark" says: You know, you really don't need a forensics team to get to the bottom of this. If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook. edit: I responded to SA from my account* and articulated why I thought he made a mistake. You created a novelty/new account called 's[am]alt[man]wrong'. Your point isn't that bad, Jeremy may deserve something (i'm not an insider on the story) but this is cowardly behavior, and downright harmful to your case due to how chldish this is. I respect Sam for taking a personal stance on this which ultimately could/might have slightly damaged him personally. So, in essence this was the point I was making here. It isn't about the issue, but how it was handled. Coming out of the woodwork in the final hours of a massive deal to demand payment is shady and doesn't seem to be handled in a way that was particularly reasonable. Just as anonymously asserting insider info on here which is unverifiable because you are choosing to hide your identity...is also less than forthcoming. You and Jeremy may be correct, but I would allege that regardless how Sam and Kyle handled themselves, the burden of being reasonable rests on detractors, I mean Kyle doesn't need to prove he added a ton of value to Cruise because he fucking started Cruise and built the team that ended up building the product that was Cruise and turned into the company that was Cruise which then put together the sale of the company(Cruise) to GM. * which is like >800 days old and pretty fucking tied to my real identity. I mean, there is a goddamn keybase public key attached to it...

nihonde 10y ago

In the scenario that you describe, you muddied the waters of Junicorn without properly cleaning up your mess during the breakup. That opens you up to claims like these, which is probably why this happened at Cruise. As soon as you have an adverse relationship to a business partner, it's time to cut bait, get releases signed, or do something completely unrelated.

vonklaus 10y ago
correct. The reason I believe that this was shitty was timing. The lawsuit coincided with the GM deal by all public accounts. Regardless of the legal structure, this was a shitty thing to do. Clearly, he cofounded Cruise and probably did contribute at least to the zeitgeist of the project. Obviously, a cliff is standard for founders and kyle (based on the application) had posted a personal 100k convertible note. so if he fired Jeremy, that's fine. Jeremy probably would be entitled to something, and it should have been spelled out. However claiming 50% 2 years later to coincide with a 1B exit, seems fucked up. The approach to this, is what I have issues with.

saltwrong 10y ago

If you read the legal documents, instead of Sam's attempt to try the case in the media, you'll see it's quite clear. There are signed documents stating Guillory owned half the equity. These documents were in YC's possession. Nothing ever voided them. Instead of separating Guillory early and cleanly, they dropped the ball, and attempted to shame him, attempted to threaten him (Sam called Guillory dozens of times in a single weekend and told him to take a small buyout or he'd never work again), and then only as a final result did the thing they should've done out of the gate: negotiate a settlement.

vonklaus 10y ago
If true, is this professional? No. However, OJ Simpson wasn't found guilty, using a technicality to escape justice. So while the legal system is helpful and i wouldn't consider it a total piece of shit, I think if I built a 1 billion dollar company and someone asked for $500M, because I forgot to file some paperwork due to the quickie shotgun starter-marriage we rushed into I would probably flip the fuck out. Also, it's like in the social network where "Mark" says: You know, you really don't need a forensics team to get to the bottom of this. If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook. edit: I responded to SA from my account* and articulated why I thought he made a mistake. You created a novelty/new account called 's[am]alt[man]wrong'. Your point isn't that bad, Jeremy may deserve something (i'm not an insider on the story) but this is cowardly behavior, and downright harmful to your case due to how chldish this is. I respect Sam for taking a personal stance on this which ultimately could/might have slightly damaged him personally. So, in essence this was the point I was making here. It isn't about the issue, but how it was handled. Coming out of the woodwork in the final hours of a massive deal to demand payment is shady and doesn't seem to be handled in a way that was particularly reasonable. Just as anonymously asserting insider info on here which is unverifiable because you are choosing to hide your identity...is also less than forthcoming. You and Jeremy may be correct, but I would allege that regardless how Sam and Kyle handled themselves, the burden of being reasonable rests on detractors, I mean Kyle doesn't need to prove he added a ton of value to Cruise because he fucking started Cruise and built the team that ended up building the product that was Cruise and turned into the company that was Cruise which then put together the sale of the company(Cruise) to GM. * which is like >800 days old and pretty fucking tied to my real identity. I mean, there is a goddamn keybase public key attached to it...