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LSD, cargo shorts and the fall of a tech CEO
- nerdponx 6y agoWhat a weird story, and weirdly reported too. Not sure what to make of it. Anyone have juicy insider info?
- boringg 6y agoSuper weird - feels like a quirky story that will generate enough people to click through.
- romanhn 6y agoIt probably feels weird because it attempts to tell Zhu's side of the story, and he still manages to come out looking bad. Investors made the right decision, it seems.
- refurb 6y ago“I was fired because I’m Asian” “But your replacement is Asian..” “Oh he’s temporary, they’ll fire him too”
- shard 6y agoI think Zhu is saying that he was fired because of his Asian management style. His partner's management style was not described, so it could be that his partner's style aligns better with what the VCs are used to.
- aatharuv 6y agoAndrew Boni doesn't sound like an East Asian name to many people, though it certainly could be. A quick google search indicates he also looks less East Asian than Justin Zhu. Edit: Since someone seemed to be irritated with my comment enough to downvote, people just with East Asian names have been known to suddenly face less discrimination once they started using non-East Asian names, or be characterized as non-East Asian after changing their names to something non-Asian. Some notable biracial (White/East Asian) Hollywood actresses with ambiguous racial characteristics have had to change their East Asian sounding name to a white name to get roles, or non-typecast roles. For example Sandrine Ho (of House of Cards) changed her name to Sandrine Holt and suddenly got more callbacks.
- nerdponx 6y agoEveryone looks bad here, to me. Zhu seems like a weirdo (who thinks it's a good idea to try your first LSD microdose right before a big meeting?), but the investors also seem like they were manipulative and removed him for somewhat arbitrary reasons.
- musingsole 6y agoIf you're arrogant enough to experiment with microdosing the first time (or one of your first times) immediately before a critical moment in your life, you're asking for trouble. I've done similarly and taken similar risks - and I'm lucky enough that the combination of my prior experiences with the stuff and luck in the moment helped see me through my troubles. But if it hadn't, it would've been painfully obvious I'd shot myself in the foot and would need to confront the choices that led me to being able to make such a stupid one.
- tyingq 6y agoThat sounds right to me, but this: "He wore cargo shorts and a T-shirt to a meeting with Geodesic, a VC firm founded by John Roos, a former U.S. ambassador to Japan. An Iterable board member later informed him Geodesic wouldn’t invest, implying it was partly because of his casual attire." Seems petty. Surely VC firms have had to look past appearances before. Of course, it did say "partly"...other things could have transpired in the meeting.
- ska 6y ago> Of course, it did say "partly"...other things could have transpired in the meeting. And another source in the article claims that had nothing to do with it; so who knows.
- 1cvmask 6y agoI think that depends on the type of VC or the particular partner at the VC. Especially the ones that invest in later stage rounds and enterprise software companies. They don’t appreciate flip flops and hoodies. I think it is always best to err on the side of “conservatism” if you want to raise money. Obviously there are many VCs who talk openly about their regrets in missing out on rocketships like Facebook because of Mark Zuckerbergs arrogance. He did the famous Sequoia pitch in pajamas: https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerbergs-brutal-prank-on-sequoia-2010-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerbergs-brutal-pran... Stuart Ellman the VC talking about Mark Zuckerbergs arrogance and why they skipped investing in Facebook: https://www.businessinsider.com/15-people-missing-out-on-millions-2014-3#vc-stuart-ellman-met-marc-zuckerberg-by-phone-but-missed-out-on-investing-in-facebook-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/15-people-missing-out-on-mil...
- okareaman 6y agoThere's no shame in taking LSD or being fired from the company you helped found because you think different as Steve Jobs might say if he were still alive. It's almost the ultimate homage to Jobs. I'm sure Zhu will be fine. I can't talk to people on LSD. I'm surprised no one told him about set and setting.
- spurgu 6y agoMicrodosing is some orders of magnitude different than "being on LSD".
- boringg 6y agoApparently Zhu messed up his dosage and was in fact tripping per article. "numbers and images swelling and shrinking on the screen”
- DonHopkins 6y ago>Believing that limited quantities of LSD would improve his pitch, Zhu, who had never before used the drug, decided to try the microdosing plan. He took what he thought was a small amount of LSD shortly before the meeting. Taking a "small amount" LSD for the first time in your life, right before an important meeting, in the vain hope that it will improve your pitch, when you don't even have any idea how it will feel, or what it will do to you, or how long it will last, or even how to medically define and accurately measure a "small amount" of LSD, is astoundingly idiotic and irresponsible. Is that how he runs his whole company? Why bother with development and staging servers? Just log in as root and hack away on the production server!
- aeoleonn 6y agoEast Asian American CEO drops acid and takes an apparently extremely casual approach to meetings with investors. Perhaps as an effort to stand out? Fails to recognize the repeated failure in such behavior. Gets fired. Plays race card. <sarcasm> No, it couldn't be about anything else but his race... No need to take personal accountability for one's actions (despite warnings)-- it's everyone else's fault for being racist! </sarcasm> This is why I refuse to live in West Coast cities. Too much SJW kool aid. edit ouch, those downvotes hurt so badly! why can't I just be a brainless sycophant like the big corporations & global governance organizations want me to be?! :( dastardly critical analysis! You've stung me again! Why can't I just take the force fed propaganda that I encounter at every turn across entertainment & "news" media! Oh brain, why do you fail me?!
- criticalhn 6y agoThis is the high quality, thoughtful commentary I come here for. Good luck with your job search btw ;)
- aeoleonn 6y agoThanks! Glad to share my perspective and happy to receive yours. What's your take on the article & story btw?
- criticalhn 6y agoMy take is that you're hilarious and awesome.
- alecfreud 6y agoIt sounds more like he was fired for being a douche rather than the LSD specifically.
- GCA10 6y agoFiguring out how to deal with non-destructive microdosing on company time might be a tough call. If he's a genius and this helps him achieve his full genius-hood, then maybe it's tolerable. But microdosing -- and getting the dose wrong! -- puts him in a whole different category. That's just a fundamental inability to act sensibly in risky situations. The board doesn't need to wait for the second example.
- colinplamondon 6y agoHe founded a company worth billions - if he was constantly showing up high, sure. Getting dosing wrong, once? As long as he learned from the experience, who cares? This is the kind of incident that plays well in the press, because it generates headlines - like becoming the first word of a headline. Do we really think that the board was so gosh-darn offended that their founder did the wrong LSD dose, once? Or, that there were long-standing disagreements over strategy, direction, and tone? The latter is harder to justify in the normie press, so they're trying to crucify him over some minor incident.
- loves_mangoes 6y agoHe didn't exactly make a small dosing mistake, though. I can understand accidentally taking 50ug by accident if you're not careful. But he was peaking on much more than a light dose, here! Zhu looked at the screen and saw numbers and images swelling and shrinking, making them impossible to discern. His body felt as if it were melting away, he says That is far from a microdose. This is showing up extremely drunk to the office. As an occasional LSD user, and I can only speak for myself, but I don't ever get enough visuals that I can't read a screen without taking way too much, or without other drugs being involved that have a synergy with LSD.
- JansjoFromIkea 6y agoWould the anxiety of realising you're tripping way more than you intended not potentially result in the effects feeling a lot stronger than it otherwise would feel?
- the_local_host 6y agoI hope society figures out how to make startups in general less capital-dependent. If there weren't investors trying to protect themselves, we'd find out if running a company in Zhu's manner works or doesn't.
- davidw 6y agoThe whole "microconf"/bootstrap crowd works in a growing space with fewer capital needs. I think they fly below the radar in a lot of ways, but that's probably not a bad thing for them.
- anotha1 6y ago> I hope society figures out how to make startups in general less capital-dependent. My 2¢: stop forcing companies to provide health insurance.
- alexilliamson 6y agoDoes health insurance drive up the need for capital that much? I've never considered that. Would love to hear more.
- anotha1 6y agoAnyone that's ever worked part-time knows the "we have to send you home because if you work anymore this week you might be considered full-time by Uncle Sam and that's bad." Another thought is throughput. If welfare wasn't so closely tied to employment, working relationships could then be more ephemeral until one found a best fit. This may also look like more cautious hiring, which directly leads to missed opportunities for all parties. Edit: Capital buys employees, but it also buys time. For every extra dollar an employee costs the amount of time it takes to make the decision to hire that employee also increases. An efficient job market would compensate based on contribution, which is a lot more possible if a significant amount wasn't mandated to be spent, and then guilted into continue spending because, you know, you don't want to take away someone's welfare.
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- davidrm 6y agoI'm sure this article only tells 10% of the story from both sides, but the fact remains that some people entrusted him with his money and that his behavior made them uncomfortable, which ultimately made them remove him from the position. I find all of this unsurprising.
- anotha1 6y agoCompletely unsurprising. I prefer to smoke weed and hang at the beach, so I don't chase investor money, or make myself responsible for the wellbeing of full-time employees. Is it limiting, absolutely. Would I rather work myself to death now so I can... one day (maybe, dad died at 50 so...) one day maybe do the same thing... Lol
- lozaning 6y agoSuch is the story of the Mexican fisherman and the harvard MBA: An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them. The Mexican replied, “only a little while. The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs. The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?” The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.” The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.” The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?” To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.” “But what then?” Asked the Mexican. The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!” “Millions – then what?” The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”
- borishn 6y agoThe board does not remove a CEO it is happy with for something this trivial, because it is too disruptive to the company. This was probably used as a pretext in a power struggle.
- mdoms 6y agoGetting zonked on a class A drug during an important meeting with investors - so zonked you can't even read your own figures on a whiteboard - is no trivial matter.
- Mauricebranagh 6y agoYeh my thought too there's a lot of shady shit that goes on in the VC world. I think he could have done with advice from a mentor who wasn't at all involved with the vc side - even on how formal meetings like board should be run. He is right about different cultures around how meetings are run though.
- jeffchuber 6y agoAdditionally, I think it's pretty obvious that the journalist knew this and the editor picked the clickbait title.
- GCA10 6y agoBoard-CEO relationships come in three flavors: - We love our CEO! We'll do anything to keep this boss happy - We're stuck with a loser, and we need to make a change - We're in the middle. This CEO has real strengths, which we appreciate, and real weaknesses, which concern us. We're regularly taking stock of the situation, and we'd probably like an orderly transition down the road. But we're probably okay for now. The third situation is quite common. And in those cases, you don't really need a "pretext" or a "power struggle." You just need the board to say: "We've tolerated a lot, but maybe we've tolerated too much. This new incident is not what we'd be seeing if we had the right CEO."
- itake 6y ago"This new incident" happened almost 2 years ago.
- gringoDan 6y agoThis story reminds me of the Basecamp saga. Here, the narrative is that the CEO is ousted because of anti-Asian bias/racism from his investors. Similarly, with Basecamp, employees quit due to a change in workplace policy that they viewed as intolerant. You can take those suppositions at face value. Or you can look at our supercharged political culture and view these prevailing narratives as convenient scapegoats. I don't think that 1/3 of Basecamp's employees decided to quit based on one meeting or an isolated policy decision. I presume many were thinking about leaving (due to workplace culture or otherwise), and a 6 month severance package made the decision easy for them. I have no idea what is going on internally at Iterable or the company's financial situation. But stellar performance gives you a lot of breathing room. Adam Neumann's drug use was tolerated and even encouraged when WeWork was doubling in value every year...right up until WeWork tried to go public and imploded. Being unconventional is embraced in the business world as long as you're delivering returns to your investors. Once you're not, it is used against you. We've seen this fall from grace play out over and over again (Travis Kalanick, Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey, etc).
- xibalba 6y agoIn this case, even the author seems to begrudgingly be admitting that this clearly was not a case of racial/ethnic bias. Rather, the company was maturing and professionalizing and the CEO refused to get on board, and even went so far as to start airing out his own dirty laundry to reports. It would seem much of board support reduces down to confidence and trust. Zhu nuked both.
- dghlsakjg 6y agoExternally the basecamp saga seems dramatic. I think the explanation is a lot simpler. At the core though, they have a highly talented group of people that probably won't have trouble finding a job in 6 months. If I was in that situation, and I agreed with the changes they made (I read Jason Fried's post, and mostly agree), I would still take the buyout! 6 months salary for me, or most engineers (or anyone, really) is A LOT of money. I like my job, and I've had lifestyle jobs that I absolutely LOVED. I can't say that I have ever loved a job so much that I would turn down that much money to leave. If I was staying I would be pretty annoyed, the people that leave get a bag of cash, and the people that stay get to pick up the slack while their former colleagues get on twitter to dump on the company?
- pmoriarty 6y agoI wonder how long it'll take for psychedelic use to cease being stigmatized in our society.
- compiler-guy 6y agoI don't think anyone would have cared if it hadn't affected his job performance so obviously. Just like no one cares (in the tech world at least) if you drink like a fish or get stoned every night if you show up the next day and get your job done.
- kvathupo 6y agoWhile people are entitled to their view of the CEO, I find many of the comments doing nothing more than insulting the CEO. As a South Asian, I think there's more meaningful discussion to be had on the "bamboo ceiling" and, in particular, how Chinese collectivist views interact in increasingly global economies. This core tension between the two views isn't going to go away. Perhaps the Eternal September is upon us?
- imwillofficial 6y ago“bamboo ceiling” I hadn’t heard of that one before. Could you expound on it more?
- whimsicalism 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_ceiling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_ceiling Someone actually did it for you already!
- imwillofficial 6y agoWhat a useless answer. I wanted his personal experience and understanding of the term. Wikipedia can’t tell me what it means to him and the experiences that informed His understanding.
- whimsicalism 6y agoThis wasn't at all clear from your question, where you said you hadn't heard the term before. Needlessly aggressive response.
- the-dude 6y agoI don't get your second sentence either.
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- softwaredoug 6y ago> Zhu believes his preference to seek consensus instead of shutting down dissenting views or engaging in noisy debates is a cultural trait his investors mistook for weakness—a stereotype about East Asians that academics researchers have cited as a reason for their underrepresentation in leadership positions in the U.S. Can we just stop for a sec and collectively roll our eyes at VCs (and our own) trope of a “tech leader”? We want some kind of decisive, basically tech bro, alpha to come in and boss people around without any context. We want the startup CEO to be a wunderkind, and magically know the right call to make at any given point. There’s little room for consensus based leadership, which has its own place. How often have you had the “hard charging leader” come in and make a mess because their confidence outstrips their know how? I’m not saying one leadership style is better than the other, I just hope we recognize good consensus based leadership should be valued as well, and it’s rather undervalued in tech culture in favor of people that sometime make a lot of noise, but end up being completely full of it.
- mc32 6y ago>” Zhu believes his preference to seek consensus instead of shutting down dissenting views or engaging in noisy debates is a cultural trait his investors mistook for weakness—a stereotype about East Asians...” I could be wrong but on the surface it looks like he’s looking for an excuse to blame something else. That stereotype was for Japanese who stereotypically seek consensus (but it’s more an expectation that you will agree with the boss rather than achieving managerial nirvana). In any case I have not seen that as a stereotype for Chinese or Taiwanese or any of the Chinese diaspora enclaves in Southeast Asia so it almost seems like someone wanting to take advantage of other people’s uncertainty of a stereotype where it’s kinda plausible.
- caturopath 6y ago> I’m not saying one leadership style is better than the other, I just hope we recognize good consensus based leadership should be valued as well, and it’s rather undervalued in tech culture in favor of people that sometime make a lot of noise, but end up being completely full of it. It seems likely that some leadership styles are better than others and plausible that techbrocracy is better than a more circumspect style for companies like this. Variety of styles at various similar firms might have benefits, but I don't think it's fair to assume that variety is worth while without an actual argument or evidence.
- drcongo 6y agoThis guy sounds great. I'd love to work with him.
- compiler-guy 6y agoWhat percentage of founders get replaced as CEO? It is very common for VC's to want what is often called, "adult supervision" once a company reaches a certain size. Even Google (home of the archetypal tech bro founder Sergey Brinn) ended up hiring Eric Schmidt once they got to a certain size. I'm sure there is anti-asian sentiment (or at least discomfort) out there, but replacing a CEO once a company gets big enough to need it is absolutely routine. Founders get pushed out by VCs all the time.
- ObserverNeutral 6y agoSergey and Larry aren't techbros. You can see it even today. People who know who they are...are in the thousands whereas people like Bezos and Musk seek to be known by the whole world. If we know something about the promotional industry is that you only become famous if you want to.
- compiler-guy 6y agoThey were then.
- xibalba 6y agoThe allegations of racial bias and the "bamboo ceiling" are entirely unsupported by this article. The two investors with whom Zhu seems to take issue were born and raised in South Asia and Turkey, respectively. Zhu was replaced by his co-founder (who supported Zhu's firing) who is of East Asian descent. Zhu believed "the company were too focused on sales and money at the expense of altruistic goals". Excuse me? You're running a company with other peoples' money at stake with the express understanding that you will seek to maximize their returns. Zhu was the one who publicized the LSD incident (which was NOT a microdose, as he admits) via his contact with a reporter. The board actually tried to intervene. Imagine finding this out as an investor. Now all your company's current and potential customers, partners, and investors know that you've got an Adam Neuman type at the helm. That's got major potential to harm investors. Ultimately, this reads as an egoist who can't sufficiently control his impulses. It's a wonder he wasn't fired sooner. Separately, much of the reporting on this has been emblematic of the sorry state of journalism. This article, for example, bends over backwards to draw tenuous connections between racial bias/identity politics and Zhu's firing. Truly shameful.
- senthil_rajasek 6y agoIt is a very narrow view to conclude racial bias did not exist by naming specific minority ethnicities. I have struggled with this question a lot and taking a bigger picture view helped me understand the systemic problem. The exact same reasoning was used by some social media users to argue that there was no racial motivation in the case of George Floyd's murder by Minneapolis police in May 2020. One of the officer was East Asian and another was not white but the man who had the knee on the neck of George Floyd was white and was the superior officer. I can't conclude that all the power over Mr.Zhu in this case was in the hands of the two VCs you mentioned.
- BurningFrog 6y agoTrying to conclude systemic patterns from single high profile cases will always fail.
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- wildermuthn 6y agoHis mistake wasn’t in taking the wrong amount of LSD. His mistake was testing it for the first time in an important meeting. But it seems this is a common type of mistake for him: taking unnecessary risks for himself rather than necessary risks for his company.
- ProAm 6y agoThis wasnt his first mistake, this was the one that finally pushed things past acceptable comfort for other decision makers. Founder/ceo of a startup is high risk, high reward and he lost on his gamble. It happens all the time. The company will continue without him.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago>Founder/ceo of a startup is high risk, high reward and he lost on his gamble. Hard to say he lost overall if he is walking away with 8-9 figure equity.
- azinman2 6y agoBut is that actually true? Most of the time in these oysters, you end up re-capped and your original equity taken away.
- azinman2 6y agoOysters is obviously an autocorrect failure. Guessing I meant “situation” or the like.
- s1artibartfast 6y agoIf that's the case, I haven't seen it. Equity can come with clawback criteria, but that usually has a defined duration, which has certainly expired because the company was founded 8 years ago. Companies can't just kick someone off the cap table once they have vested equity.
- djrogers 6y agoReporting like this infuriates me - it's nothing more than gossip when presented this way: "He wore cargo shorts and a T-shirt to a meeting with Geodesic, a VC firm founded by John Roos, a former U.S. ambassador to Japan. An Iterable board member later informed him Geodesic wouldn’t invest, implying it was partly because of his casual attire. A person familiar with the firm’s thinking says Zhu’s attire didn’t factor into the firm’s decision" So was it the shorts or was it not the shorts? If the reporter has a solid source saying it wasn't the shorts, then why bring it up at all, unless the gossip aspect of it fits your narrative...
- gwern 6y agoThe anecdote is there to establish a pattern of sloppiness and carelessness and unnecessary risk-taking. Regardless of whether it, ex post, affected Geodesic's decision, it clearly could have affected it ex ante, and he should not have taken such a completely unnecessary risk, which helps establish his unfitness and why the LSD was the final straw/excuse.
- shard 6y agoI think it's good that the reporter is showing multiple viewpoints. Rarely is there one canonical view in situations like this. The implications here are that the Iterable board member had a personal discussion with a decision maker at Geodesic, and got the hint that they felt Zhu was disrespectful, which the board member attributed to the attire. The person familiar with Geodesic's thinking could be echoing the official line at Geodesic, as they know they are speaking with a reporter. The reporter shows both sides and stays neutral, letting us make up our minds ourselves.
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- tariksbl 6y agoHis next startup: "we take the od out of microdose". Actually make the world a better place.
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.is/6PZku https://archive.is/6PZku
- cercatrova 6y agoHis mistake was not - taking LSD - arguing with board members - wearing cargo shorts Rather, his mistake was not retaining control of the company he founded, either by bootstrapping it entirely or not taking venture capital. Contrast this to the recent Basecamp debacle, both cofounders owned 100% of the company and could do as they pleased, no one could fire them.
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- danielrhodes 6y agoI see this as very misguided. Companies do not exist for the pleasure of the founders, they exist to serve a need that is greater than the founders. If a founder (or any executive for that matter) is threatening the well-being of the company, having board oversight is a benefit. Thus, retaining 100% control of a board is not always in your company's best interests, and can be a big liability. You want more accountability, not less. To that degree, even if the company does not take venture capital, you as the CEO might still want people on your board that can be good advisors and hold you accountable. The board is the CEO's boss, and just like with any boss, behavior has consequences.
- cercatrova 6y ago> Companies do not exist for the pleasure of the founders I disagree with this notion, even as you might agree. If I'm making a company, it exists for my sole pleasure. If it didn't, then I wouldn't have bothered creating the company in the first place. > The board is the CEO's boss, and just like with any boss, behavior has consequences. I would make a company to get away from having a boss at all, not so that a board could now be my new boss.
- smsm42 6y ago> His co-founder, Andrew Boni, and the company’s entire board told him he was losing his job, primarily because he had taken LSD before a meeting in 2019. From the article, looks like that wasn't the actual reason. The actual reason is that Zhu preferred his own personal brand PR (with heavy social justice activism overtones, accusing anybody who challenges him of racism because he happens to be of Asian descent) to the good of the company, and was unwilling to reconcile the two.
- desmosxxx 6y agoI think this is the right conclusion. IMO your parenthetical is almost too kind.
- sparrc 6y agoIn my experience moving the engineering-minded founder(s) to some other role like CTO and getting a more experienced "business school" type CEO is very common at some stage of a startup's life. If he was refusing to make this change then it probably was just a bog-standard power struggle.
- geocrasher 6y agoThe guy trips on LSD before investors, refuses to cooperate with people who work with him, and then blames getting fired on his race? No matter what real biases may be involved, those are things that would get a lot of people fired, no matter their race or anything else.
- lordgrenville 6y agoMatt Levine had a good bit on this yesterday. A bit long to quote but the gist is that as an early-stage investor you want to look for founders who are weird (who might also be into stuff like microdosing), otherwise you're probably being too conservative. As you get closer to going public, though, you want a stodgier, more respectable CEO. So there's an awkward middle phase where the expectations change, and Zhu might have misread it.
- eastbayjake 6y ago... but is taking LSD before a board meeting securities fraud?
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- NotPavlovsDog 6y agoThe real lesson is,and been for a while, if you do a start-up, do like Zuckerberg and The Google boys. If you want your company to stay your company, watch that vital stock and keep the majority votes. Zuckerberg: “So one of the things that I’ve been lucky about in building this company is ... I kind of have voting control of the company, and that’s something I focused on early on. And it was important because, without that, there were several points where I would’ve been fired. For sure, for sure,” Source: The Verge
- mdavis6890 6y agoIn the vast majority of cases this will preclude you from getting investment money. Sure - some companies can get away with that, but not a lot of them.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 6y agoIt’s normal to give up, what, 10% a round? That means you can afford to give up voting rights on the first few rounds. If you have a strong enough trajectory at that point you may be in a position to make demands to keep more voting power.
- dcolkitt 6y agoCounterpoint: Other investors have as much incentive to maximize the value of the company as I do. Besides ego, why should I care if someone is brought in who can do a better job. I still get to keep all my shares, and don’t even have to show up to work anymore.
- azinman2 6y ago> I still get to keep all my shares That often isn’t the case. I personally know of situations where CEOs were pushed out and recapped to effectively little.
- NotPavlovsDog 6y agoZuck in the Verge article discussed how much pressure there was to sell to Yahoo for 1B. For an average start-up, it might be being pushed to sell for, say, someM when you could wait and chance on 10xsomeM if you had the votes.
- say_it_as_it_is 6y agoRecover and redeem yourself, Justin.
- drknownuffin 6y agoGot high before an investor meeting, brought internal board discussions to the press, was unfamiliar with business performance ("Most of the board also wanted Zhu to commit to memorizing key company metrics as part of a performance improvement plan"), he "believed that he and the company were too focused on sales and money at the expense of altruistic goals," and the guy who replaced him is also East Asian. Naturally, he presents the issue as being all about him getting ousted for being Asian.
- sunsipples 6y agoSo they didn't realise Mr Zhu was Asian until now? This is some real Scooby-Doo shit.
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- throwaway00127 5y agoWe mustn't forgot the Eastern value of going to an important business meeting in shorts while high on LSD! Trying to pull the race card after you get fired for tripping on acid at an investor's meeting is the most Silicon Valley "young disruptor" high-on-the-smell-of-your-own farts CEO thing I've ever heard of.