4 ms·

There are certainly exceptions, but in a very practical sense if the founder didn’t put the majority of capital into the business it’s unlikely and unrealistic

by JCM9 3y ago

There are certainly exceptions, but in a very practical sense if the founder didn’t put the majority of capital into the business it’s unlikely and unrealistic that they’ll get some sort of special protection. The thing many founders struggle to comprehend when taking on outside capital is that there comes a point fairly early on when it’s not really your company anymore… you just work for it as a minority shareholder. The other investors have a fiduciary duty to their own stakeholders that generally comes before the founder’s desire for special treatment. Good founders that know they’re not the right ones to lead the next phase of the business know when to step aside. Founders that don’t and try to cling on when they’ve long passed the threshold of their own competence to lead aren’t doing anyone favors by trying to cling on.

herewego 3y ago
Agreed and well put. This is one reason why bootstrapping is such an attractive alternative for many who are able.
- shortrounddev2 3y ago
  I've always been inspired by the story of id software, who funded their company by simply making a product and selling it. It seems like so many people in tech want to come up with an idea and immediately execute it at scale with tens of millions of dollars in seed money. It seems like profit is secondary to investment rounds at startups. Id software was able to remain independent and in control of the partners by making world class products and selling them directly to the consumer
  - bombcar 3y ago
    They call this a “lifestyle” business apparently - and part of the issue is that those who do that kind of bootstrapping are often comfortable stopping at some small millions. Who needs more? An example from another industry is successful restaurants - if you don’t franchise you’re basically capped, and some are quite content with that. A local bar “franchised” - each of the kids of the original owner has their own variation on the bar/restaurant.
    - shortrounddev2 3y ago
      It just seems like what you're taught about how business works in high school (make a product, sell it, reinvest money to make more products and make more money) is at odds with the tech industry. In tech, ideas can often be worth more than their execution. Virtual teenagers are given millions of dollars for an idea they have some specialization in from a bachelor's or masters degree, and often the companies go belly up because 24 year olds don't have the requisite life experience to run a business
    - mindcrime 3y ago
      They call this a “lifestyle” business apparently - and part of the issue is that those who do that kind of bootstrapping are often comfortable stopping and some small millions. Who needs more? "Lifestyle business or scalable business", and "bootstrapping or vc" are largely orthogonal concerns. Not completely as there's basically no path to taking VC funding to build a lifestyle business. But the converse does not hold - you can certainly bootstrap a company that is meant to grow into far more than a "lifestyle company". Is it easy? No, but nothing worth doing ever is...
  - wmf 3y ago
    One of the four co-founders (and largest shareholder?) of id was forced out: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/id-software-co-founder-sues-former-colleagues https://www.gamesindustry.biz/id-software-co-founder-sues-fo...
Retric 3y ago
It’s not just control but also reputation. The Tesla founders Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, got kicked out and then almost completely ignored for their contributions. There’s was even a lawsuit around who got to call themselves founders. Not everyone is going to care about that stuff, but many do.
- Baldbvrhunter 3y ago
  Or PG turns up with Aaron Swartz and says "he's one of your founders now" and when he dies, you can stop saying it.
- jdjdjdkdksmdnd 3y ago
  please tell me exactly and explicitly what the founders of tesla contributed
  - lowkeyokay 3y ago
    Hi, Elon?
  - MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago
    Looks like over the five years they were there they founded it, got it funded, and got them through the first car creation and delivery: the roadster. Pretty big deal, I didn’t actually know that much about these two but that’s incredibly impressive. Thanks for giving me a reason to do some research on the topic. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Martin-Eberhard-and-Marc-Tarpenning https://www.britannica.com/biography/Martin-Eberhard-and-Mar...
    - ilikehurdles 3y ago
      They were out by the time roadster entered production. Musk provided the first financing round, and became pretty involved since the beginning of designing the roadster. Pretty good story on it here[1] [1]: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/05/tesla200705?currentPage=all&printable=true https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/05/tesla200705?currentP...
londons_explore 3y ago
> Good founders that know they’re not the right ones to lead the next phase of the business know when to step aside. Part of making that happen is to make sure the founder has little economic handcuffs. Ie. if the company is wildly successful they should get a decent payout whoever is at the helm.
- kiba 3y ago
  Open AI is an organization supposedly dedicated to AI safety research. It's not a business that's about making $$$ (supposedly). Altman doesn't even own shares.
  - tivert 3y ago
    > It's not a business that's about making $$$ (supposedly). Altman doesn't even own shares. That doesn't pass the small test anymore. Altman must have some other angle.
throw1234651234 3y ago
This implies that there are good leaders at scale. I doubt this. So far all I have seen is that a good company gets built, and professional milkers come in. That is, they professionally milk the structure that is built, bring in their similar friends, bloat the company to pad their resume, and then leave before things start going downhill from the pretend-growth. I say this in full seriousness.
- mayukh 3y ago
  Why does that happen?
  - throw1234651234 3y ago
    1. "Leaders" want to seem hyper-competent. They don't want to figure out why the existing system was built or defer to previous leadership. So they tear things out and bring their own people, effectively starting over on some aspects. They also attribute blame and appropriate credit. 2. "Leaders" want to create scale and "progress". The company is doing fine with one engineering team? But how would that look on my resume? Let's get two dev ops team to "optimize" $100/month cloud costs for a $2 billion dollar revenue company (yes, you read that right). Let's add 9 more dev teams. Let's completely rebuild the tech stack because a). My friends prefer x to y and z). We can pretend we did something. If I sound bitter, I am not, but this IS a true story - 3 years in, 70 more IT employees (mostly devs), dev isn't any faster and we just go back to where the product started, almost. 3. "Leaders" often can't zoom in, despite the claim that leaders are excellent at focusing at the right scale. 4. "Leaders" like to play leader, because actual leading is hard. Acquiring random companies definitely creates "growth". 5. On top of #4, they come in when there is financing and are basically used to free money, so they throw it around.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - motoxpro 3y ago
    The more interesting question is, from a business pov, is there any other way? If it were profitable to continue creating that good company, people would do it because there is a return to be made. If "leave before things start going downhill from the pretend-growth" happens everytime, there is an arbitrage opportunity to just continue compounding the "good" company.
JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
> > The thing many founders struggle to comprehend when taking on outside capital is that there comes a point fairly early on when it’s not really your company anymore That's why Venture Capital has an history of about 25 years, whereas debt has a history of 10,000 years. Business is a very abstract thing, not very limbic at all, and thus it's only fun when you can call the shots, otherwise it becomes a boat where you steer left and nothing happens, you steer right and nothing happens, basically every sailor's nightmare. With debt you get to steer the boat whatever and however you like, but if you don't make it in time to the next port of call the bank repossesses it, that's a much better proposition, concentrating the politics solely in the moments where you close the loan and then after it you are free to do whatever the fuck you want and in the worst case scenario you declare bankruptcy.
- pge 3y ago
  While I agree with your characterization of debt v. equity capital (e.g. VC money), it is important to recognize that what are strengths of debt from an entrepreneur's standpoint (limited upside, no control) are weaknesses from an investor standpoint. That's why debt is only applicable up to a certain level of risk. Lenders won't lend to a raw startup with no history; the upside even with relatively high interest rates doesn't make up for the downside. Only equity offers the risk-reward tradeoff necessary to attract investors in those situations, hence venture capital. That's also why equity-like investing in some form or another has been around for centuries (e.g. whaling ships), and Venture Capital in essentially the same form as today has been in the US at least since the 40s.
  - JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
    > > are weaknesses from an investor standpoint They solely qualify as weaknesses in this modern world where the stock and bond market eat the world. In the past investing simply meant making money without having to do any work, so even an extremely small profit made without working meant good news for the investor, because the risk free rate was just sitting on top of it and make zero profit, or even negative profit because you had to defend your money against thieves and rats, humidity and sunshine. Of course nowadays every investment opportuinity is compared against the US Treasury or the SP500 in terms of volatility, liquidity, stability etc... That's also the reason why we should break up big banks, big banks are always in capital conservation mode and so they will always compare a lending opportuinity against the SP500 and Fed Rate, always inveitably picking the latter even when it's zero. Because for them capital conservation and status quo=winning given that they are so big and powerful already. A small bank is hungry to grow and can only do that by giving out risky loans. Alternatively the entrepreneur should give some kickbacks to the guy within the big bank who takes the responsibility to extend him loan instead of dumping those funds into Fed Rate and SP500. An other alternative would be that people stop trusting public companies because cooking the books is trivial and the big 4 auditing companies are clueless anyway, so that at least some of those funds end up being availible for loans at the local level where gossip dominates the conversation and that's a much better instrument to evaluate a company than rating agencies and auditing companies.
ubermonkey 3y ago
>Good founders that know they’re not the right ones to lead the next phase of the business know when to step aside. The problem is that now we have the Facebook/Zuckerberg example, wherein the founder managed to take outside money, and even go public, while still protecting his absolutely control of the company. As with most public firms, each Class A share owned gives you one vote. However, Meta also has Class B shares that give the owner TEN votes each -- and Zuck owns a simple majority of those Class B shares. His voting power means he can do whatever he wants regardless of what the Class A shareholders want. (Zuck is also both CEO and Chair of the board.) https://www.morningstar.com/sustainable-investing/how-facebook-silences-its-investors https://www.morningstar.com/sustainable-investing/how-facebo... This structure is weird, but not unique. The end result is that Zuck got to have his cake (public money) and eat it to (keep absolutely control).
- lubonay 3y ago
  What's more interesting to me is that, so far, this strategy has worked fairly well for him and the other shareholders.
- JCM9 3y ago
  As I said there are exceptions, but most founders should not expect to be able to create similar scenarios. If you walk into the office of a VC in the present market and say I want your money but I want to keep full control, that meeting is not going to go well.
- nolongerthere 3y ago
  Zuck should be seen as the exception not the rule, he is demonstrably much smarter than your average CEO or even your average SV founder. Yea he's a robot, but while that may make him less likable among the general public he still is able to show enough "EQ" to his team and investors to keep them happy. Everyone thinks they can replicate his success because they too are smart and have a great idea, but most really aren't as smart as him and he really lucked out with the timing, SV funding was still young enough that he was able to get away with things that would never fly today.
  - 3y ago
Waterluvian 3y ago
I suspect investors sometimes enable this thinking. Making founders feel like it’s still their company can be a subjective, low-cost perk investors can “offer” when negotiating terms.
api 3y ago
If you took angel/VC what you basically did is create a very interesting job for yourself with a lot of upward mobility and a comp package that is strongly tied to the company's performance. If you want it to be 100% yours you must bootstrap or keep it as a side project (either side income or just FOSS). Expecting something to be 100% yours after taking other peoples' money to build it feels kind of entitled TBH. That being said, good investors want the founder to be very committed and to have a personal attachment to the company. They need you to really give a damn. So some amount of attachment beyond "just a job" is good and even expected. I'm just saying there is a continuum between "just a gig" and "it's 100% my baby" and an externally funded company is neither. Closer to your baby than just a gig, but not 100%. If you don't let go a little bit and put a little bit of boundary up when you take capital, you are setting yourself up for heated conflicts with your investors, co-founders (if any), and other senior employees. You're also setting yourself up for a soul-crushing ego blow if it doesn't go well and especially if it goes sideways for reasons you don't have full control over.
- reaperman 3y ago
  51% voting shares is a reasonable facsimile of 100% ownership. There's a middle ground available between bootstrapping and losing control.
phkahler 3y ago
>> The other investors have a fiduciary duty to their own stakeholders (themselves) that generally comes before the founder’s desire for special treatment. That is not a criticism. It should be obvious why outsiders invest in something, and it sounds like some founders forget this because they are so focused on the thing they spent a lot of time on. >> Good founders that know they’re not the right ones to lead the next phase of the business know when to step aside. But it's debatable when that is. It also depends what the goals are. There is absolutely NO legal requirement that a company has to have profit as it's main objective. If the goal is to make the best widget possible, one can go from MVP and ramen profitability to a lifelong business without taking investment. Hah, so that's "when" you step aside - when you decide to shift from product-focused to money focused! Those are definitely two different skills. You are effectively cashing out, but investors aren't just going to buy the business and hand you a check. They need to keep you around because you're the expert in whatever you've built so far, hence letting you stay as a minority shareholder (handcuffs).
duxup 3y ago
Yeah if you sell out... you sold, someone else now owns some part of the organization. I don't mean "sell out" in the colloquial sense where it is a negative. Nothing wrong with selling something, but that has consequences. If a founder is really worried about this I guess they could see how investors feel if you want a "but you can't ever fire me" clause or something, at the very least it should make the exchange clearer... Taking a step further we see regular "Founder sold company to mega corp and is now sad about the result". Dude got paid and got his ... that was the deal. I get their sentiment but when I'm a customer I am sometimes a bit miffed when I see that expressed as it's my problem now and he got out with the cash.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

by JCM9 3y ago

herewego 3y ago

Agreed and well put. This is one reason why bootstrapping is such an attractive alternative for many who are able.

shortrounddev2 3y ago
I've always been inspired by the story of id software, who funded their company by simply making a product and selling it. It seems like so many people in tech want to come up with an idea and immediately execute it at scale with tens of millions of dollars in seed money. It seems like profit is secondary to investment rounds at startups. Id software was able to remain independent and in control of the partners by making world class products and selling them directly to the consumer
- bombcar 3y ago
  They call this a “lifestyle” business apparently - and part of the issue is that those who do that kind of bootstrapping are often comfortable stopping at some small millions. Who needs more? An example from another industry is successful restaurants - if you don’t franchise you’re basically capped, and some are quite content with that. A local bar “franchised” - each of the kids of the original owner has their own variation on the bar/restaurant.
  - shortrounddev2 3y ago
    It just seems like what you're taught about how business works in high school (make a product, sell it, reinvest money to make more products and make more money) is at odds with the tech industry. In tech, ideas can often be worth more than their execution. Virtual teenagers are given millions of dollars for an idea they have some specialization in from a bachelor's or masters degree, and often the companies go belly up because 24 year olds don't have the requisite life experience to run a business
  - mindcrime 3y ago
    They call this a “lifestyle” business apparently - and part of the issue is that those who do that kind of bootstrapping are often comfortable stopping and some small millions. Who needs more? "Lifestyle business or scalable business", and "bootstrapping or vc" are largely orthogonal concerns. Not completely as there's basically no path to taking VC funding to build a lifestyle business. But the converse does not hold - you can certainly bootstrap a company that is meant to grow into far more than a "lifestyle company". Is it easy? No, but nothing worth doing ever is...
- wmf 3y ago
  One of the four co-founders (and largest shareholder?) of id was forced out: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/id-software-co-founder-sues-former-colleagues https://www.gamesindustry.biz/id-software-co-founder-sues-fo...

Retric 3y ago

It’s not just control but also reputation. The Tesla founders Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, got kicked out and then almost completely ignored for their contributions. There’s was even a lawsuit around who got to call themselves founders. Not everyone is going to care about that stuff, but many do.

Baldbvrhunter 3y ago
Or PG turns up with Aaron Swartz and says "he's one of your founders now" and when he dies, you can stop saying it.
jdjdjdkdksmdnd 3y ago
please tell me exactly and explicitly what the founders of tesla contributed
- lowkeyokay 3y ago
  Hi, Elon?
- MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago
  Looks like over the five years they were there they founded it, got it funded, and got them through the first car creation and delivery: the roadster. Pretty big deal, I didn’t actually know that much about these two but that’s incredibly impressive. Thanks for giving me a reason to do some research on the topic. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Martin-Eberhard-and-Marc-Tarpenning https://www.britannica.com/biography/Martin-Eberhard-and-Mar...
  - ilikehurdles 3y ago
    They were out by the time roadster entered production. Musk provided the first financing round, and became pretty involved since the beginning of designing the roadster. Pretty good story on it here[1] [1]: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/05/tesla200705?currentPage=all&printable=true https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/05/tesla200705?currentP...

londons_explore 3y ago

> Good founders that know they’re not the right ones to lead the next phase of the business know when to step aside. Part of making that happen is to make sure the founder has little economic handcuffs. Ie. if the company is wildly successful they should get a decent payout whoever is at the helm.

kiba 3y ago
Open AI is an organization supposedly dedicated to AI safety research. It's not a business that's about making $$$ (supposedly). Altman doesn't even own shares.
- tivert 3y ago
  > It's not a business that's about making $$$ (supposedly). Altman doesn't even own shares. That doesn't pass the small test anymore. Altman must have some other angle.

throw1234651234 3y ago

This implies that there are good leaders at scale. I doubt this. So far all I have seen is that a good company gets built, and professional milkers come in. That is, they professionally milk the structure that is built, bring in their similar friends, bloat the company to pad their resume, and then leave before things start going downhill from the pretend-growth. I say this in full seriousness.

mayukh 3y ago
Why does that happen?
- throw1234651234 3y ago
  1. "Leaders" want to seem hyper-competent. They don't want to figure out why the existing system was built or defer to previous leadership. So they tear things out and bring their own people, effectively starting over on some aspects. They also attribute blame and appropriate credit. 2. "Leaders" want to create scale and "progress". The company is doing fine with one engineering team? But how would that look on my resume? Let's get two dev ops team to "optimize" $100/month cloud costs for a $2 billion dollar revenue company (yes, you read that right). Let's add 9 more dev teams. Let's completely rebuild the tech stack because a). My friends prefer x to y and z). We can pretend we did something. If I sound bitter, I am not, but this IS a true story - 3 years in, 70 more IT employees (mostly devs), dev isn't any faster and we just go back to where the product started, almost. 3. "Leaders" often can't zoom in, despite the claim that leaders are excellent at focusing at the right scale. 4. "Leaders" like to play leader, because actual leading is hard. Acquiring random companies definitely creates "growth". 5. On top of #4, they come in when there is financing and are basically used to free money, so they throw it around.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- motoxpro 3y ago
  The more interesting question is, from a business pov, is there any other way? If it were profitable to continue creating that good company, people would do it because there is a return to be made. If "leave before things start going downhill from the pretend-growth" happens everytime, there is an arbitrage opportunity to just continue compounding the "good" company.

JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago

> > The thing many founders struggle to comprehend when taking on outside capital is that there comes a point fairly early on when it’s not really your company anymore That's why Venture Capital has an history of about 25 years, whereas debt has a history of 10,000 years. Business is a very abstract thing, not very limbic at all, and thus it's only fun when you can call the shots, otherwise it becomes a boat where you steer left and nothing happens, you steer right and nothing happens, basically every sailor's nightmare. With debt you get to steer the boat whatever and however you like, but if you don't make it in time to the next port of call the bank repossesses it, that's a much better proposition, concentrating the politics solely in the moments where you close the loan and then after it you are free to do whatever the fuck you want and in the worst case scenario you declare bankruptcy.

pge 3y ago
While I agree with your characterization of debt v. equity capital (e.g. VC money), it is important to recognize that what are strengths of debt from an entrepreneur's standpoint (limited upside, no control) are weaknesses from an investor standpoint. That's why debt is only applicable up to a certain level of risk. Lenders won't lend to a raw startup with no history; the upside even with relatively high interest rates doesn't make up for the downside. Only equity offers the risk-reward tradeoff necessary to attract investors in those situations, hence venture capital. That's also why equity-like investing in some form or another has been around for centuries (e.g. whaling ships), and Venture Capital in essentially the same form as today has been in the US at least since the 40s.
- JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
  > > are weaknesses from an investor standpoint They solely qualify as weaknesses in this modern world where the stock and bond market eat the world. In the past investing simply meant making money without having to do any work, so even an extremely small profit made without working meant good news for the investor, because the risk free rate was just sitting on top of it and make zero profit, or even negative profit because you had to defend your money against thieves and rats, humidity and sunshine. Of course nowadays every investment opportuinity is compared against the US Treasury or the SP500 in terms of volatility, liquidity, stability etc... That's also the reason why we should break up big banks, big banks are always in capital conservation mode and so they will always compare a lending opportuinity against the SP500 and Fed Rate, always inveitably picking the latter even when it's zero. Because for them capital conservation and status quo=winning given that they are so big and powerful already. A small bank is hungry to grow and can only do that by giving out risky loans. Alternatively the entrepreneur should give some kickbacks to the guy within the big bank who takes the responsibility to extend him loan instead of dumping those funds into Fed Rate and SP500. An other alternative would be that people stop trusting public companies because cooking the books is trivial and the big 4 auditing companies are clueless anyway, so that at least some of those funds end up being availible for loans at the local level where gossip dominates the conversation and that's a much better instrument to evaluate a company than rating agencies and auditing companies.

ubermonkey 3y ago

>Good founders that know they’re not the right ones to lead the next phase of the business know when to step aside. The problem is that now we have the Facebook/Zuckerberg example, wherein the founder managed to take outside money, and even go public, while still protecting his absolutely control of the company. As with most public firms, each Class A share owned gives you one vote. However, Meta also has Class B shares that give the owner TEN votes each -- and Zuck owns a simple majority of those Class B shares. His voting power means he can do whatever he wants regardless of what the Class A shareholders want. (Zuck is also both CEO and Chair of the board.) https://www.morningstar.com/sustainable-investing/how-facebook-silences-its-investors https://www.morningstar.com/sustainable-investing/how-facebo... This structure is weird, but not unique. The end result is that Zuck got to have his cake (public money) and eat it to (keep absolutely control).

lubonay 3y ago
What's more interesting to me is that, so far, this strategy has worked fairly well for him and the other shareholders.
JCM9 3y ago
As I said there are exceptions, but most founders should not expect to be able to create similar scenarios. If you walk into the office of a VC in the present market and say I want your money but I want to keep full control, that meeting is not going to go well.
nolongerthere 3y ago
Zuck should be seen as the exception not the rule, he is demonstrably much smarter than your average CEO or even your average SV founder. Yea he's a robot, but while that may make him less likable among the general public he still is able to show enough "EQ" to his team and investors to keep them happy. Everyone thinks they can replicate his success because they too are smart and have a great idea, but most really aren't as smart as him and he really lucked out with the timing, SV funding was still young enough that he was able to get away with things that would never fly today.
- 3y ago

Waterluvian 3y ago

I suspect investors sometimes enable this thinking. Making founders feel like it’s still their company can be a subjective, low-cost perk investors can “offer” when negotiating terms.

api 3y ago

If you took angel/VC what you basically did is create a very interesting job for yourself with a lot of upward mobility and a comp package that is strongly tied to the company's performance. If you want it to be 100% yours you must bootstrap or keep it as a side project (either side income or just FOSS). Expecting something to be 100% yours after taking other peoples' money to build it feels kind of entitled TBH. That being said, good investors want the founder to be very committed and to have a personal attachment to the company. They need you to really give a damn. So some amount of attachment beyond "just a job" is good and even expected. I'm just saying there is a continuum between "just a gig" and "it's 100% my baby" and an externally funded company is neither. Closer to your baby than just a gig, but not 100%. If you don't let go a little bit and put a little bit of boundary up when you take capital, you are setting yourself up for heated conflicts with your investors, co-founders (if any), and other senior employees. You're also setting yourself up for a soul-crushing ego blow if it doesn't go well and especially if it goes sideways for reasons you don't have full control over.

reaperman 3y ago
51% voting shares is a reasonable facsimile of 100% ownership. There's a middle ground available between bootstrapping and losing control.

phkahler 3y ago

>> The other investors have a fiduciary duty to their own stakeholders (themselves) that generally comes before the founder’s desire for special treatment. That is not a criticism. It should be obvious why outsiders invest in something, and it sounds like some founders forget this because they are so focused on the thing they spent a lot of time on. >> Good founders that know they’re not the right ones to lead the next phase of the business know when to step aside. But it's debatable when that is. It also depends what the goals are. There is absolutely NO legal requirement that a company has to have profit as it's main objective. If the goal is to make the best widget possible, one can go from MVP and ramen profitability to a lifelong business without taking investment. Hah, so that's "when" you step aside - when you decide to shift from product-focused to money focused! Those are definitely two different skills. You are effectively cashing out, but investors aren't just going to buy the business and hand you a check. They need to keep you around because you're the expert in whatever you've built so far, hence letting you stay as a minority shareholder (handcuffs).

duxup 3y ago

Yeah if you sell out... you sold, someone else now owns some part of the organization. I don't mean "sell out" in the colloquial sense where it is a negative. Nothing wrong with selling something, but that has consequences. If a founder is really worried about this I guess they could see how investors feel if you want a "but you can't ever fire me" clause or something, at the very least it should make the exchange clearer... Taking a step further we see regular "Founder sold company to mega corp and is now sad about the result". Dude got paid and got his ... that was the deal. I get their sentiment but when I'm a customer I am sometimes a bit miffed when I see that expressed as it's my problem now and he got out with the cash.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]