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I've always wondered, do you really have as much decision power with 51% of the company as 100%?

• iuguy 18y ago
  In theory, yes. Having said that, leverage can be achieved through means beyond shareholdings and it's worth remembering that if you're heavily dependent on your VC for assistance.
• gaius 18y ago
  Nope: http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/ http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/ Having said that, it's not at all clear what Greenspun really wanted VC money for in his cash-generative services company. Perhaps he shouldn't have bitten off more than he could swallow.
  • mechanical_fish 18y ago
    it's not at all clear what Greenspun really wanted VC money for in his cash-generative services company Read his new, improved, more nuanced explanation in Founders at Work. If I were to summarize his answer: It requires intestinal fortitude to embrace slow, organic growth at the cost of turning down lots and lots of business from a market that is begging for your services. But it is also hard to recruit people to grow your company -- especially businesspeople -- in a bubble economy where every company with a domain name is going public with billion-dollar valuations. So ArsDigita tried to come up with a plan to go public, and that inevitably involved VCs, because back then investment banks didn't bother talking to privately funded companies, because the fix was in: Why bother working with actual, profitable companies when you can make more money by scratching a VC's back? It's not like the market was paying attention to fundamentals at the time. The moral of this story is that bubbles suck. They're completely disorienting: The market value of everything is screwed up, and you're surrounded by irrational people. I do not miss those days at all.