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Zynga is aiming squarely at their feet and firing a cannon. Would you invest in a company where management is obviously looking for a short term cashout at the

Zynga is aiming squarely at their feet and firing a cannon. Would you invest in a company where management is obviously looking for a short term cashout at the expense of the future success of the company? The future success is precisely what the investor is buying. It's like buying a car while the seller is actively pulling parts out of it. The results of this will be reduced share values combined with lawsuits eating up any potential gains.

slavak 15y ago
I was also wondering about this. A few people here commented that this is obviously a move by the execs to claw back as much stock as possible for themselves before the IPO in order to ditch it and run. On one level, this sounds realistic. But you have to wonder: Isn't taking this kind of action so close to the IPO just going to put their stock price into free-fall? Did they simply not expect this kind of headlines, or maybe I'm overestimating the amount of exposure this is going to get outside the HN community?
- johngalt 15y ago
  I've got no doubt the execs still make more overall, but how much more? And is the difference worth their name? We will never really know the answer to this question. Likely they picked a minority of the employees, and there will be a lot of unfair pressure on them not to "rock the boat" from the rest of the staff. So if the employees take it lying down I don't think much will come of it. Conversely, if it blows up into a full class action. Then Zynga could be in trouble. You'll have newspapers running statistics like "X% of people who got ripped off are convieniently minorities or women".
- kls 15y ago
  No investors are myopically focused on short term trends, if anything this will be looked at as an opportunity to replace those positions with off-shore bodies that can further reduce price, drive up the short term and dump it. I can almost guarantee that this idea came from their IPO investment house that is handling the IPO, I will have to dig up who is handling it, but this one seems to be right out of the play book of how to drive up the short term gains. Long enough for the institutional investors to flip their holdings while the numbers are still going up, but before the product rot sets in.
api 15y ago
They don't care about the long term. They are going for IPO (hand off to dumber money) and then getting out. The game is: lie, leverage, flip.

slavak 15y ago

I was also wondering about this. A few people here commented that this is obviously a move by the execs to claw back as much stock as possible for themselves before the IPO in order to ditch it and run. On one level, this sounds realistic. But you have to wonder: Isn't taking this kind of action so close to the IPO just going to put their stock price into free-fall? Did they simply not expect this kind of headlines, or maybe I'm overestimating the amount of exposure this is going to get outside the HN community?

johngalt 15y ago
I've got no doubt the execs still make more overall, but how much more? And is the difference worth their name? We will never really know the answer to this question. Likely they picked a minority of the employees, and there will be a lot of unfair pressure on them not to "rock the boat" from the rest of the staff. So if the employees take it lying down I don't think much will come of it. Conversely, if it blows up into a full class action. Then Zynga could be in trouble. You'll have newspapers running statistics like "X% of people who got ripped off are convieniently minorities or women".
kls 15y ago
No investors are myopically focused on short term trends, if anything this will be looked at as an opportunity to replace those positions with off-shore bodies that can further reduce price, drive up the short term and dump it. I can almost guarantee that this idea came from their IPO investment house that is handling the IPO, I will have to dig up who is handling it, but this one seems to be right out of the play book of how to drive up the short term gains. Long enough for the institutional investors to flip their holdings while the numbers are still going up, but before the product rot sets in.

api 15y ago

They don't care about the long term. They are going for IPO (hand off to dumber money) and then getting out. The game is: lie, leverage, flip.