5 ms·

I don't understand business much but it looks it was really nice of them to return the money to investors. They could just let the investors bear the brunt of t

• brazzy 7y ago
  > They could just let the investors bear the brunt of their bad investment without giving a damn. Not if they wanted to continue running the company.
• marcinzm 7y ago
  The investors owned part of the company in return for giving them money. Possibly they owned a majority of the company. For example, the investors would make more money by forcing some sort of fire sale of the companies assets which you don't want if your goal is to continue running the company.
• toast76 7y ago
  As majority owners, we certainly could have continued to run the company indefinitely as a "lifestyle business" (and there's not much anyone could have done about it). But my belief is that if you take investment you have a responsibility to those investors to return their capital come hell or high water. At the time, we didn't entirely know whether there were still growth opportunities or what else we could try if we kept going. But we knew we wanted to keep trying. Some of our investors wanted out, and we gave them (and all the other investors) the opportunity to sell their shares back to us. It means everyone who wanted it got their money back (which for an investor is not actually a very good outcome, but better than $0), and we got to keep the company. I'm appreciative of them allowing us to do it.