6 ms·

Don't work with assholes

77 points by frans 3y ago

mnky9800n 3y ago
this is sort of besides the point of the article, but why do people make businesses to sell them? as a scientist, i am not terribly interested in giving away the ideas that i have worked on for, typically, years. i become quite invested in them and continue to pursue them and evolve them until the funding runs out or new interests pop up that are worth replacing the old ones (typically this is an evolution as well). So to me, working hard for many years to build a company only to hand it to someone else seems like its not really a rewarding experience. I understand the part where people do this for money, but is there no personal investment? why would a business run the same without the person who did all the work doing it? i guess if the business is plumbing, and you have a list of clients who regularly call you to do plumbing, and then you don't want to do plumbing anymore because you are tired of it, you are really just selling the list of clients. and because your company has the brand recognition, you can say, well this guy is going to do your plumbing from now on but its still good old mnky9800n plumbing. still seems like a risky idea, but i guess if you are fully divested from the venture then what do you care? except for the likelihood that someone else will not care so much about mnky9800n plumbing as me.
- ahoka 3y ago
  Because life is finite.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
  I couldn't care less about giving ideas away no matter how long I worked on them. Ideas exist as a tool for me to get what I really want out of the world. When they outlive that purpose I endeavor to discard them quickly and without fanfare.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  You can work at a business you do not own. You do not have to sell 100% of the business.
- cabbagefan 3y ago
  [dead]
- mathgeek 3y ago
  Sometimes it's the goal from the start, and sometimes it’s a result of time changing interests and priorities (not everyone wants the same thing 5-10 years later). Many folks also want to maximize the amount of their life spent not working. Some times it’s as simple as wanting to be wealthy (or wealthier).
- ggeorgovassilis 3y ago
  > but why do people make businesses to sell them Building something and maintaining it are two different things which require different skills, different finances and different partners. Innovation requires a curious, scientific mind. Making something profitable requires engineering and an MBA.
- herbst 3y ago
  ADHD :) But seriously I love building things but support is tiring. I don't build a business to sell them, but I sell a business once I am not passionate enough anymore.
- nordsieck 3y ago
  > why do people make businesses to sell them? Think of it as specialization. Some people are best in the wear-many-hats start up stage where everything is scrappy and there aren't a lot of rules and structure. And if they want the business to continue to grow and prosper, eventually that environment needs to change. And sometimes people who are good at the startup stage have trouble transitioning into a more mature phase of a business's lifetime. In which case, it's probably more responsible to sell it to someone who can properly nurture it.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  never get married to a position. whether I bought shares in my trading portfolio, or created shares in a new business, its all to sell them at a higher price. your unfamiliarity with that concept is because you are segregated from the market almost completely in your scientist example, you are subsidized by programs where it’s completely mystical why the funding runs out when it does, as opposed to rapidly iterating on marketable things as a means to an end I also have a couple of non-profit entities now, those are specially incentivized to dump otherwise sunk cost ideas into, but they are not sunk cost in a non profit. there is no reason to ever do this outside of that structure privatize the gains, socialize the losses, thats the whole philosophy. it is predicated on actually having gains to begin with.
- cornfutes 3y ago
  > why do people make businesses to sell them? Money to go do something else.
- probably_wrong 3y ago
  > why would a business run the same without the person who did all the work doing it? This is the part that I don't get either. I can imagine hearing "this coffee shop got better since the new owners", but I know I have heard "this place used to be good until it changed owners". And since the new owners have paid X years of profit which they arguably want to recover in less than X years, it is more than likely that they'll start cutting costs as a result. So I wouldn't have a reason to believe that a business with new owners would run just as well as before, and in fact I would expect the opposite.
  - JD557 3y ago
    > This is the part that I don't get either. I can imagine hearing "this coffee shop got better since the new owners", but I know I have heard "this place used to be good until it changed owners". And since the new owners have paid X years of profit which they arguably want to recover in less than X years, it is more than likely that they'll start cutting costs as a result. To be fair, I know at least one case of "this coffee shop got better since the new owners", but to be fair, it's because coffee shops are not really comparable to startups - namely because a very unsuccessful café can still hold huge real estate value. Namely, in this case I'm talking about a café near a city center and a huge office building, but it was very dark, had old moldy sandwiches exposed and mixed low quality coffee with the brand coffee. As you can imagine, after it was acquired by the new owners they just had to redecorate and sell normal products, and it quickly got packed every day. Not sure if there's any possible equivalent for tech companies, though.
- krisoft 3y ago
  > why would a business run the same without the person who did all the work doing it? This is 100% a concern. If a business is successful because the founder puts in insane amount of work that makes it less valuable to buy. You ask the question: What would happen if the founders take a multi-month vacation? If the business would keep pumping money, either because it is passive, or because they trained people well and the machine is working without them, then that is a good candidate to buy. If it would fall, or cease to be a business that is a bad business to buy.
- bradley13 3y ago
  We had a small IT business. In our case, I discovered that I dislike all the sales, networking, and marketing stuff - which was dominating my time. Our attempts to outsource that just didn't work: marketing companies are happy to take your money, right up until you require them to meet sales targets. So we sold, for a pittance really, but I got my life back.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > as a scientist, i am not terribly interested in giving away the ideas that i have worked on for, typically, years. i become quite invested in them And, at the point that something new grabs your interest, wouldn't you rather let go of that thing you spent years on? This is why people make businesses to sell - they are looking forward to the next new thing.
- xboxnolifes 3y ago
  Some people enjoy building a business, not running one.
- GuB-42 3y ago
  Creating something and working with something established are two different things requiring different skills. Let's say you are an inventor, you just made, say, a new type of coffee maker. You just did some prototypes, worked out the details, made it safer and more convenient, have it make better tasting coffee, considered mass production, etc... You filed the patent and now have a great product on your hands, and now what? Are you going to do value engineering, process scaling, etc... and build your career on that? These are interesting topics, but maybe that's not what you are good at, and you prefer inventing, so you will sell that patent to someone who is more into mass production and optimization and work on your next invention. Businesses are like inventions, some people prefer and are better at creating new businesses, others are more about keeping things stable and profitable on the long term. The work the founder has done does not necessarily make him better for growing the business and making profits.
cabbagefan 3y ago
[dead]
robg 3y ago
When you deal with a*holes don’t be surprised when you’re covered in sh*t.
bouke 3y ago
> With a young family and a new life beginning, I did not want to ruin the limited time I have on this earth with my loved ones being a dad whose head is somewhere else, rather than enjoying these moments together. This a*hole wasn't worth it. I paid him off to leave us alone. While understandable from his POV, I'm disappointed to see the guy getting paid for services not rendered, and so reinforcing his tactics.
- b0o 3y ago
  True, but from my point of view OP won because he was able to see through the aholes true plans causing the ahole to only get the crumbs of a much larger piece of the pie at the end. To us and others it may seem to be a large sum, but to him it was definitely only a pittance of what he intended to take.
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    > True, but from my point of view OP won because he was able to see through the aholes true plans causing the ahole to only get the crumbs of a much larger piece of the pie at the end. I didn't get that from the article - I read it as the broker got his full commission. In fact, it reads as if the broker got even more than he expected, because the final sale price was 25% more.
- crossroadsguy 3y ago
  I kind of get it and as I am aging I get it more and more. You are avoiding headache and actually putting cost to that time spent and stress added to your life. Sometimes it's just not worth it to engage. Not same, but I will put it in the direction of paying a bribe (again, I didn't say same or even same level).
- davidwritesbugs 3y ago
  As an ex-lawyer I'd say this was 100% a good decision. As a profession we make our living off people who say "Dammit I won't pay, it's the principle, it's wrong & immoral." I, and I suspect many other lawyers, would always reply that principles cost a fortune in money time and grey hairs. I had plenty of clients and didn't need to litigate for billable hours.
jerrre 3y ago
Offtopic: this title seems to mess with the title AutoCapitalizer
LLcolD 3y ago
What is M&A that is referenced in article?
- MosnterBurger 3y ago
  Mergers & Acquisitions (I think)
- altacc 3y ago
  Mergers & Acquisitions
dale_glass 3y ago
This also applies in non-business contexts. If you have a nice open source project, minecraft server, web forum, whatever: get rid of the assholes. Even if they are a highly capable person, in the end it's not worth it. They'll turn off other valuable community members, cause drama, and shift the general atmosphere to the worse.
- blueflow 3y ago
  And how do we find out who is the asshole? All people that i heard saying this were convinced its not themselves.
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    Somebody wrote a whole book about this. I've not actually read it, but at least wikipedia's summary is something I agree with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No_Asshole_Rule#Recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No_Asshole_Rule#Recognitio...
  - hnfong 3y ago
    And that's the flaw of the article. The author would not have known the broker was an asshole until they actually started working with them. Sure you can decide to back out sooner, but then you still worked with the asshole if only for a short while. The real problem is how to identify the asshole, which isn't much of a moral tale but a matter of experience and competence in screening people and attracting good people.
neilv 3y ago
> Guess who has a strong interest in the holding company? He does! Here we have a broker, purportedly acting for the seller in a transaction, who also benefits from a holding company as a buyer. I'm not a lawyer, but if that's not a conflict I don't know what is. What government authority regulates this kind of broker (e.g., is there a fiduciary responsbility?), and investigates conflicts of interest like the one alleged here? Or is that entirely a civil matter?
- pizzafeelsright 3y ago
  No idea. These regulations and barriers can be bypassed if enough value can be extracted despite laws to the contrary.
bjarneh 3y ago
That really wasn't the ending I was hoping for here. It almost looks like the legal system is made specifically to benefit these kind of trolls. They can drag cases with no merit over years, leaving you with lawyer fees etc. during that period.
zcw100 3y ago
There is a book about it called "The no Asshole Rule" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No_Asshole_Rule#:~:text=The%20theme%20of%20this%20book,the%20same%20degree%20of%20awfulness%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No_Asshole_Rule#:~:text=Th....
DanielHB 3y ago
One thing I learned while buying my home is that most middleman in this kind of environment care more about volume of sales than value of sale, even if they are on commission. Increasing the sale price by 10% might mean 10% more in his bank account at the cost of much more work for himself and missed opportunity of closing other sales.
pelasaco 3y ago
Any way to proof that the author actually sold his company by a better price than initially said? Otherwise it's just a bad sci-fi. What I learned from this story? You're always the bad guy in someone's story. Specially if this someone has a blog, time to blog and get linked to HN.
- regularjack 3y ago
  I think you just outed yourself.
  - pelasaco 3y ago
    lol what? It's just that every story has two sides. Back in the days I had a small ISP and we engaged someone to sell it. In my opinion it was the best ISP in the world, in his opinion (seller) it was just one more product that he was selling. So i can imagine that other people selling their company feel like their are selling their own baby, and that's their baby are super special, but for people doing M&A, it's like selling used cars.
    - suprjami 3y ago
      There's a difference between your business being just another business, and your broker intentionally under-valuing your company so that their own acquisition farm can acquire you cheap then flip you for the actual market value and pocket the difference. The first is a reality of business. The second is a conflict of interest, immoral, rude, and should be illegal.
- suprjami 3y ago
  The asshole was not named so the negative effect on the person is zero. The author clearly states the moral to not work with people where the alarm bells are ringing.
  - pelasaco 3y ago
    "Don't work with aholes" is assuming the premise that the author himself isn't not the ahole in the story. If his company was so good, why he wanted to sell it in first place?
Beijinger 3y ago
" In spite of my intuition telling me not to." Always go with your intuition "There was a lot of work to do to get the materials together for him. I invested months of time in a back-and-forth with him, with me compiling and developing this information." ROTFL. Old story. You have an seriously interested buyer? Charge a non-reimbursable upfront payment that will be credited towards the deal, should there be one. This will compensate for the amount of time you have to invest. The buyer bulks. Why? Walk away. His advices 1 to 3 are excellent. I give you a few more for free a) It is never too early to walk away from something bad b) Do you know what is the death of every business deal? Lengthy negotiations c) If someone uses a word, an expression, a sentence that sounds odd to you. Something that you would not use in this context. Never ever let this slide as a hick up, mistake, or whatever. Always make sure to ask what exactly he means by this. E.g. talking about license deals when talking about a VC investment (don't ask, please don't ask for the story).
- 97-109-107 3y ago
  Well, we have to ask to share the story "talking about license deals when talking about a VC investment"
neilv 3y ago
> Peace and love to everyone out there. Including the broker. The writer warned a lot of founders/owners of a problem they might encounter, in many M&A proceedings, which is great. Also, maybe they wanted to get it off their chest. And getting blog content out of a bad experience is a silver lining. But I'm skeptical of "love" for the broker. Especially if people who wanted to know who that broker is could figure it out. Then broker might be more likely to call it "libel" than "love". My current thinking is that sometimes you should dance around some of the details of warnings that come from experience. Vague but honest phrases like "I've heard of" and "I've seen in the field" can help. As can being informed and motivated by first-hand experience, but using second-hand public examples from other instances of the problem, when communicating about the general problem.
TheDong 3y ago
"This guy was trying to make a profit, what an asshole. I, on the other hand, made and sold a snake-oil SEO shopify plugin, and sure, some of the shopify users who have purchased fine snake-oil from me may think I'm an asshole ..." If you're going to take the moral high ground, I feel like table stakes are to not have made a ponzi, cryptocurrency, ad network, murder-for-hire, timeshare, or SEO service.
blkhawk 3y ago
I can't help myself and have to speculate how to reverse UNO this: Basically the scam works because as a "defender" in this legal attack our plucky founder has to do a good and expensive job defending himself while the ass-tacker knowing he has no hope of winning can do a crappy bad job just dragging stuff out. The business relationship they had gives this probably enough of a cover to not get tossed out right away. Since generally in the US each party pays their own expenses this works for ass-tacker. Now if you turn this around simply pay ass-tacker what he asked for then sue him for having done a bad job on the sale he had no part in but invoiced you for. Since ass-tacker now needs to defend he has to spend money disproportionately. There have to be legal firms that do this service for you.
CipherThrowaway 3y ago
>What did give me pause was how he handled negotiations over a clause in our potential agreement. He didn't listen to my concerns, and didn't budge one inch. I've learned to listen to my gut in these situations. The worse your gut feeling is about an agreement, the harder you should push back on it until you can negotiate something that you're comfortable with. I usually give new relationships the benefit of the doubt once. Your first bad gut feeling can be wrong, but I've always regretted moving past a second bad gut feeling. Be extremely suspicious if your counterpart tries to rush you through a contract negotiation process by downplaying the importance of the agreement while simultaneously refusing to budge on it.
wg0 3y ago
This is a side noob question. Is there a platform/website/portal where such businesses are listed for sale and purchase? Like someone interested in selling their indie thingy? Or a company interested in buying few projects of specific type/niche/market etc?
- ssss11 3y ago
  Flippa is one such site. For big deals - known brands etc, I would assume the only way to access those deals is knowing the brokers.
GerryB 3y ago
It's common to find this kind of asshole behavior in residential real estate agents. It can be understood when you realize they get a commision as a fraction of the sale price. This does NOT make their interests align with yours! Unintuitively, it is usually in their interest to sell your home as cheaply as possible (!) in order to sell QUICKLY. They would much rather sell your $1M house in two weeks as opposed to a $1.2M price which would take them four weeks of work. Their payday in terms of income per week of effort is far far higher in the lowball case.. the one that screws you, their "client", out of significant money.
epups 3y ago
Honestly, this story is just unsatisfying with the level of details provided, and ends up with action that is opposite to its title - don't work with asshole, but pay them off when they make ridiculous demands? Seems to me like the author signed a bad contract and was forced to comply, even though the services rendered were underwhelming.
SnoJohn 3y ago
Robert Ringer wrote the classic on this type of behavior: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Ringer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Ringer It's called Winning Through Intimidation, and it is a very funny story of how he learned to not get burned in real estate transactions by being prepared for the inevitable tricks people would try to play on him. Short and lots of sage advice.
ryaneager 3y ago
You can say asshole, it’s 2023 no one will get offended. No need for this pointless self-censoring.

77 points by frans 3y ago

this is sort of besides the point of the article, but why do people make businesses to sell them? as a scientist, i am not terribly interested in giving away the ideas that i have worked on for, typically, years. i become quite invested in them and continue to pursue them and evolve them until the funding runs out or new interests pop up that are worth replacing the old ones (typically this is an evolution as well). So to me, working hard for many years to build a company only to hand it to someone else seems like its not really a rewarding experience. I understand the part where people do this for money, but is there no personal investment? why would a business run the same without the person who did all the work doing it? i guess if the business is plumbing, and you have a list of clients who regularly call you to do plumbing, and then you don't want to do plumbing anymore because you are tired of it, you are really just selling the list of clients. and because your company has the brand recognition, you can say, well this guy is going to do your plumbing from now on but its still good old mnky9800n plumbing. still seems like a risky idea, but i guess if you are fully divested from the venture then what do you care? except for the likelihood that someone else will not care so much about mnky9800n plumbing as me.

ahoka 3y ago
Because life is finite.
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
I couldn't care less about giving ideas away no matter how long I worked on them. Ideas exist as a tool for me to get what I really want out of the world. When they outlive that purpose I endeavor to discard them quickly and without fanfare.
charcircuit 3y ago
You can work at a business you do not own. You do not have to sell 100% of the business.
cabbagefan 3y ago
[dead]
mathgeek 3y ago
Sometimes it's the goal from the start, and sometimes it’s a result of time changing interests and priorities (not everyone wants the same thing 5-10 years later). Many folks also want to maximize the amount of their life spent not working. Some times it’s as simple as wanting to be wealthy (or wealthier).
ggeorgovassilis 3y ago
> but why do people make businesses to sell them Building something and maintaining it are two different things which require different skills, different finances and different partners. Innovation requires a curious, scientific mind. Making something profitable requires engineering and an MBA.
herbst 3y ago
ADHD :) But seriously I love building things but support is tiring. I don't build a business to sell them, but I sell a business once I am not passionate enough anymore.
nordsieck 3y ago
> why do people make businesses to sell them? Think of it as specialization. Some people are best in the wear-many-hats start up stage where everything is scrappy and there aren't a lot of rules and structure. And if they want the business to continue to grow and prosper, eventually that environment needs to change. And sometimes people who are good at the startup stage have trouble transitioning into a more mature phase of a business's lifetime. In which case, it's probably more responsible to sell it to someone who can properly nurture it.
yieldcrv 3y ago
never get married to a position. whether I bought shares in my trading portfolio, or created shares in a new business, its all to sell them at a higher price. your unfamiliarity with that concept is because you are segregated from the market almost completely in your scientist example, you are subsidized by programs where it’s completely mystical why the funding runs out when it does, as opposed to rapidly iterating on marketable things as a means to an end I also have a couple of non-profit entities now, those are specially incentivized to dump otherwise sunk cost ideas into, but they are not sunk cost in a non profit. there is no reason to ever do this outside of that structure privatize the gains, socialize the losses, thats the whole philosophy. it is predicated on actually having gains to begin with.
cornfutes 3y ago
> why do people make businesses to sell them? Money to go do something else.
probably_wrong 3y ago
> why would a business run the same without the person who did all the work doing it? This is the part that I don't get either. I can imagine hearing "this coffee shop got better since the new owners", but I know I have heard "this place used to be good until it changed owners". And since the new owners have paid X years of profit which they arguably want to recover in less than X years, it is more than likely that they'll start cutting costs as a result. So I wouldn't have a reason to believe that a business with new owners would run just as well as before, and in fact I would expect the opposite.
- JD557 3y ago
  > This is the part that I don't get either. I can imagine hearing "this coffee shop got better since the new owners", but I know I have heard "this place used to be good until it changed owners". And since the new owners have paid X years of profit which they arguably want to recover in less than X years, it is more than likely that they'll start cutting costs as a result. To be fair, I know at least one case of "this coffee shop got better since the new owners", but to be fair, it's because coffee shops are not really comparable to startups - namely because a very unsuccessful café can still hold huge real estate value. Namely, in this case I'm talking about a café near a city center and a huge office building, but it was very dark, had old moldy sandwiches exposed and mixed low quality coffee with the brand coffee. As you can imagine, after it was acquired by the new owners they just had to redecorate and sell normal products, and it quickly got packed every day. Not sure if there's any possible equivalent for tech companies, though.
krisoft 3y ago
> why would a business run the same without the person who did all the work doing it? This is 100% a concern. If a business is successful because the founder puts in insane amount of work that makes it less valuable to buy. You ask the question: What would happen if the founders take a multi-month vacation? If the business would keep pumping money, either because it is passive, or because they trained people well and the machine is working without them, then that is a good candidate to buy. If it would fall, or cease to be a business that is a bad business to buy.
bradley13 3y ago
We had a small IT business. In our case, I discovered that I dislike all the sales, networking, and marketing stuff - which was dominating my time. Our attempts to outsource that just didn't work: marketing companies are happy to take your money, right up until you require them to meet sales targets. So we sold, for a pittance really, but I got my life back.
lelanthran 3y ago
> as a scientist, i am not terribly interested in giving away the ideas that i have worked on for, typically, years. i become quite invested in them And, at the point that something new grabs your interest, wouldn't you rather let go of that thing you spent years on? This is why people make businesses to sell - they are looking forward to the next new thing.
xboxnolifes 3y ago
Some people enjoy building a business, not running one.
GuB-42 3y ago
Creating something and working with something established are two different things requiring different skills. Let's say you are an inventor, you just made, say, a new type of coffee maker. You just did some prototypes, worked out the details, made it safer and more convenient, have it make better tasting coffee, considered mass production, etc... You filed the patent and now have a great product on your hands, and now what? Are you going to do value engineering, process scaling, etc... and build your career on that? These are interesting topics, but maybe that's not what you are good at, and you prefer inventing, so you will sell that patent to someone who is more into mass production and optimization and work on your next invention. Businesses are like inventions, some people prefer and are better at creating new businesses, others are more about keeping things stable and profitable on the long term. The work the founder has done does not necessarily make him better for growing the business and making profits.

cabbagefan 3y ago

[dead]

robg 3y ago

When you deal with a*holes don’t be surprised when you’re covered in sh*t.

bouke 3y ago

> With a young family and a new life beginning, I did not want to ruin the limited time I have on this earth with my loved ones being a dad whose head is somewhere else, rather than enjoying these moments together. This a*hole wasn't worth it. I paid him off to leave us alone. While understandable from his POV, I'm disappointed to see the guy getting paid for services not rendered, and so reinforcing his tactics.

b0o 3y ago
True, but from my point of view OP won because he was able to see through the aholes true plans causing the ahole to only get the crumbs of a much larger piece of the pie at the end. To us and others it may seem to be a large sum, but to him it was definitely only a pittance of what he intended to take.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > True, but from my point of view OP won because he was able to see through the aholes true plans causing the ahole to only get the crumbs of a much larger piece of the pie at the end. I didn't get that from the article - I read it as the broker got his full commission. In fact, it reads as if the broker got even more than he expected, because the final sale price was 25% more.
crossroadsguy 3y ago
I kind of get it and as I am aging I get it more and more. You are avoiding headache and actually putting cost to that time spent and stress added to your life. Sometimes it's just not worth it to engage. Not same, but I will put it in the direction of paying a bribe (again, I didn't say same or even same level).
davidwritesbugs 3y ago
As an ex-lawyer I'd say this was 100% a good decision. As a profession we make our living off people who say "Dammit I won't pay, it's the principle, it's wrong & immoral." I, and I suspect many other lawyers, would always reply that principles cost a fortune in money time and grey hairs. I had plenty of clients and didn't need to litigate for billable hours.

jerrre 3y ago

Offtopic: this title seems to mess with the title AutoCapitalizer

LLcolD 3y ago

What is M&A that is referenced in article?

MosnterBurger 3y ago
Mergers & Acquisitions (I think)
altacc 3y ago
Mergers & Acquisitions

dale_glass 3y ago

This also applies in non-business contexts. If you have a nice open source project, minecraft server, web forum, whatever: get rid of the assholes. Even if they are a highly capable person, in the end it's not worth it. They'll turn off other valuable community members, cause drama, and shift the general atmosphere to the worse.

blueflow 3y ago
And how do we find out who is the asshole? All people that i heard saying this were convinced its not themselves.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  Somebody wrote a whole book about this. I've not actually read it, but at least wikipedia's summary is something I agree with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No_Asshole_Rule#Recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No_Asshole_Rule#Recognitio...
- hnfong 3y ago
  And that's the flaw of the article. The author would not have known the broker was an asshole until they actually started working with them. Sure you can decide to back out sooner, but then you still worked with the asshole if only for a short while. The real problem is how to identify the asshole, which isn't much of a moral tale but a matter of experience and competence in screening people and attracting good people.

neilv 3y ago

> Guess who has a strong interest in the holding company? He does! Here we have a broker, purportedly acting for the seller in a transaction, who also benefits from a holding company as a buyer. I'm not a lawyer, but if that's not a conflict I don't know what is. What government authority regulates this kind of broker (e.g., is there a fiduciary responsbility?), and investigates conflicts of interest like the one alleged here? Or is that entirely a civil matter?

pizzafeelsright 3y ago
No idea. These regulations and barriers can be bypassed if enough value can be extracted despite laws to the contrary.

bjarneh 3y ago

That really wasn't the ending I was hoping for here. It almost looks like the legal system is made specifically to benefit these kind of trolls. They can drag cases with no merit over years, leaving you with lawyer fees etc. during that period.

zcw100 3y ago

There is a book about it called "The no Asshole Rule" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No_Asshole_Rule#:~:text=The%20theme%20of%20this%20book,the%20same%20degree%20of%20awfulness%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No_Asshole_Rule#:~:text=Th....

DanielHB 3y ago

One thing I learned while buying my home is that most middleman in this kind of environment care more about volume of sales than value of sale, even if they are on commission. Increasing the sale price by 10% might mean 10% more in his bank account at the cost of much more work for himself and missed opportunity of closing other sales.

pelasaco 3y ago

Any way to proof that the author actually sold his company by a better price than initially said? Otherwise it's just a bad sci-fi. What I learned from this story? You're always the bad guy in someone's story. Specially if this someone has a blog, time to blog and get linked to HN.

regularjack 3y ago
I think you just outed yourself.
- pelasaco 3y ago
  lol what? It's just that every story has two sides. Back in the days I had a small ISP and we engaged someone to sell it. In my opinion it was the best ISP in the world, in his opinion (seller) it was just one more product that he was selling. So i can imagine that other people selling their company feel like their are selling their own baby, and that's their baby are super special, but for people doing M&A, it's like selling used cars.
  - suprjami 3y ago
    There's a difference between your business being just another business, and your broker intentionally under-valuing your company so that their own acquisition farm can acquire you cheap then flip you for the actual market value and pocket the difference. The first is a reality of business. The second is a conflict of interest, immoral, rude, and should be illegal.
suprjami 3y ago
The asshole was not named so the negative effect on the person is zero. The author clearly states the moral to not work with people where the alarm bells are ringing.
- pelasaco 3y ago
  "Don't work with aholes" is assuming the premise that the author himself isn't not the ahole in the story. If his company was so good, why he wanted to sell it in first place?

Beijinger 3y ago

" In spite of my intuition telling me not to." Always go with your intuition "There was a lot of work to do to get the materials together for him. I invested months of time in a back-and-forth with him, with me compiling and developing this information." ROTFL. Old story. You have an seriously interested buyer? Charge a non-reimbursable upfront payment that will be credited towards the deal, should there be one. This will compensate for the amount of time you have to invest. The buyer bulks. Why? Walk away. His advices 1 to 3 are excellent. I give you a few more for free a) It is never too early to walk away from something bad b) Do you know what is the death of every business deal? Lengthy negotiations c) If someone uses a word, an expression, a sentence that sounds odd to you. Something that you would not use in this context. Never ever let this slide as a hick up, mistake, or whatever. Always make sure to ask what exactly he means by this. E.g. talking about license deals when talking about a VC investment (don't ask, please don't ask for the story).

97-109-107 3y ago
Well, we have to ask to share the story "talking about license deals when talking about a VC investment"

neilv 3y ago

> Peace and love to everyone out there. Including the broker. The writer warned a lot of founders/owners of a problem they might encounter, in many M&A proceedings, which is great. Also, maybe they wanted to get it off their chest. And getting blog content out of a bad experience is a silver lining. But I'm skeptical of "love" for the broker. Especially if people who wanted to know who that broker is could figure it out. Then broker might be more likely to call it "libel" than "love". My current thinking is that sometimes you should dance around some of the details of warnings that come from experience. Vague but honest phrases like "I've heard of" and "I've seen in the field" can help. As can being informed and motivated by first-hand experience, but using second-hand public examples from other instances of the problem, when communicating about the general problem.

TheDong 3y ago

"This guy was trying to make a profit, what an asshole. I, on the other hand, made and sold a snake-oil SEO shopify plugin, and sure, some of the shopify users who have purchased fine snake-oil from me may think I'm an asshole ..." If you're going to take the moral high ground, I feel like table stakes are to not have made a ponzi, cryptocurrency, ad network, murder-for-hire, timeshare, or SEO service.

blkhawk 3y ago

I can't help myself and have to speculate how to reverse UNO this: Basically the scam works because as a "defender" in this legal attack our plucky founder has to do a good and expensive job defending himself while the ass-tacker knowing he has no hope of winning can do a crappy bad job just dragging stuff out. The business relationship they had gives this probably enough of a cover to not get tossed out right away. Since generally in the US each party pays their own expenses this works for ass-tacker. Now if you turn this around simply pay ass-tacker what he asked for then sue him for having done a bad job on the sale he had no part in but invoiced you for. Since ass-tacker now needs to defend he has to spend money disproportionately. There have to be legal firms that do this service for you.

CipherThrowaway 3y ago

>What did give me pause was how he handled negotiations over a clause in our potential agreement. He didn't listen to my concerns, and didn't budge one inch. I've learned to listen to my gut in these situations. The worse your gut feeling is about an agreement, the harder you should push back on it until you can negotiate something that you're comfortable with. I usually give new relationships the benefit of the doubt once. Your first bad gut feeling can be wrong, but I've always regretted moving past a second bad gut feeling. Be extremely suspicious if your counterpart tries to rush you through a contract negotiation process by downplaying the importance of the agreement while simultaneously refusing to budge on it.

wg0 3y ago

This is a side noob question. Is there a platform/website/portal where such businesses are listed for sale and purchase? Like someone interested in selling their indie thingy? Or a company interested in buying few projects of specific type/niche/market etc?

ssss11 3y ago
Flippa is one such site. For big deals - known brands etc, I would assume the only way to access those deals is knowing the brokers.

GerryB 3y ago

It's common to find this kind of asshole behavior in residential real estate agents. It can be understood when you realize they get a commision as a fraction of the sale price. This does NOT make their interests align with yours! Unintuitively, it is usually in their interest to sell your home as cheaply as possible (!) in order to sell QUICKLY. They would much rather sell your $1M house in two weeks as opposed to a $1.2M price which would take them four weeks of work. Their payday in terms of income per week of effort is far far higher in the lowball case.. the one that screws you, their "client", out of significant money.

epups 3y ago

Honestly, this story is just unsatisfying with the level of details provided, and ends up with action that is opposite to its title - don't work with asshole, but pay them off when they make ridiculous demands? Seems to me like the author signed a bad contract and was forced to comply, even though the services rendered were underwhelming.

SnoJohn 3y ago

Robert Ringer wrote the classic on this type of behavior: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Ringer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Ringer It's called Winning Through Intimidation, and it is a very funny story of how he learned to not get burned in real estate transactions by being prepared for the inevitable tricks people would try to play on him. Short and lots of sage advice.

ryaneager 3y ago

You can say asshole, it’s 2023 no one will get offended. No need for this pointless self-censoring.