It seems like he had his eyes set on a majority stake in Alfred but wasn’t able to get it and replicated the company anyways. It’s common to buy a company and

It seems like he had his eyes set on a majority stake in Alfred but wasn’t able to get it and replicated the company anyways. It’s common to buy a company and scale it up as opposed to building one from scratch (a recent example is Travis Kalanick of Uber fame buying and scaling up CloudKitchens). But, Neumann still having shares in Alfred constitutes a conflict of interest. If you ask me, he probably wants to outcompete the startup with his hefty funding and buy it on the cheap.