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Sometimes you learn about a person implicitly more than his explicit intentional declarations. This is the same Vinod Koshla who seized a public beach, and a be

Sometimes you learn about a person implicitly more than his explicit intentional declarations. This is the same Vinod Koshla who seized a public beach, and a beautiful and rare one, to his own utility against the law. This says a lot about attitude to others, maybe in business too. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/27/martins-beach-vinod-khosla_n_5885662.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/27/martins-beach-vinod...

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
quizotic 11y ago
and sometimes you learn about a person by working with them. Long ago, Vinod was an investor and director of two of my early companies. He was helpful, supportive, polite and wonderful.
- DodgyEggplant 11y ago
  People change
  - DodgyEggplant 11y ago
    yet again: not agree = downvote.
    - escape_goat 11y ago
      Low quality comments are consistently downvoted without remorse. Your response added nothing substantive or interesting for people to read on the comment page. You didn't even bother to use proper syntax. By contrast, you will note that your original comment, disagreeable as it may be to the other commentator and to the other friends of Mr. Khosa, has not been downvoted.
      - simonebrunozzi 11y ago
        And I upvoted yours for the same reasons :)
      - DodgyEggplant 11y ago
        Maybe, but more downvotes were for the initial comment
        escape_goat 11y ago
        You need to think about it this way: historically, the comment pages of HN have made for very good, diverse, and interesting reading. One learns odd and varied details about historical technological decisions, rocket engine design, et cetera... anything may come up. The commentators on Hacker News include a wide variety of domain experts, mildly historical figures, legions upon legions of extremely experienced programmers, managers, entrepreneurs, and so on. This is what has drawn most of us here. The comments, ideas, and speculations produced by persons such as myself are fine, perhaps, but frankly, they're not nearly as interesting to read. This leads us to one of the most frustrating oddities of the Hacker News website: you can't collapse the comments. If there's a tree structure of comments, every comment will take up at least a good thumb's width of screen space. The consequence of this is that every comment is an imposition on the reader. Every comment needs to be able to account for itself. Posting on Hacker News is a performance, rather than a conversation. We're on stage, whether anyone wants us there or not, and unless we're trying to write words that other people might find valuable, unless we're at least trying, then yes, we will be swiftly downvoted to oblivion by everyone, including people exactly like ourselves. There may be annoyance behind it, but there's scarcely enough thought wasted for malice. One-liners must be very informative or situationally relevant messages. And properly capitalized and punctuated. Or else they should go unwritten.
- swalsh 11y ago
  To be fair, being helpful to a company you have an investment in is just a good business move... it doesn't implicitly make you a "better person".
  - wslh 11y ago
    I don't know Vinod Khosla personally but all people have many faces.
- coleslawfail 11y ago
  How long ago? He's been at this almost 30 years. He doesn't need the money. Now it's all about him. Martin's Beach is the symptom of the disease.
  - glibgil 11y ago
    Is the disease greed?
    - adventured 11y ago
      Non-billionaires take actions regularly based on the notion that they are right in their course, morally and or legally. Now size that up to billionaire status. They too are likely to take actions based on thinking that they are in fact right in their decision making. The issue in that case: billionaires often tend to impact a lot of other people with their actions, because so much of what they do is outsized. My issue might be with my neighbors on a single property line marker. Or maybe they think my trashcans are encroaching on their curb area, pick the issue. Billionaires generate billionaire-size problems.
- sqeaky 11y ago
  Doesn't the placard at Jimmy Jon's say something like "You can't tell how nice a person is by how they treat you, watch how they treat the waiter."?
  - aaronbrethorst 11y ago
    Funny placard, that: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/10/jimmy-johns-noncompete-agreement_n_7042112.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/10/jimmy-johns-noncomp...
  - npizzolato 11y ago
    I don't find myself quoting Harry Potter often, but there's a really good quote in Goblet of Fire: "If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals."
mpdehaan2 11y ago
The article also indicates he was paying a very large amount in liability taxes and maintaince for a road he possibly owned (it says $500k), and was only offered the ability to charge $2 for parking to offset that. Given, I'm not sure where the $500k comes from. It also seems he was trying to restrict access to the road, not the beach. Maybe he didn't own the road, but it seems you should be able to restrict access to a road you own, but that no one owns a beach, and it didn't actually say he restricted the beach. Maybe that was the intent, but maybe it was due to problems with the cars parking along the road after leaving it open for two years. I do believe most VCs can reduce the potential of the company when the founders have a cohesive vision for it already and know how to run it, and they do have an interest in saying they are better than the others :) So it is a lot about finding those that give good advice, but don't force it, and that's incredibly hard to judge in initial conversations with any of them. I'd recommend talking to companies they are invested in and their fellow board members (i.e. the founders who created the tech) that work for companies they have invested in.
- Retric 11y ago
  It's very common for property owners to be required to allow access to another property. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easement Basically, he entered into a contract as part of buying property and now he does not want to abide by it. Which suggests doing business with him is a terrible idea.
  - escape_goat 11y ago
    I have some relevant experience. My father owns a property with an easement, purchased from an attorney who worked in easement law, in a different jurisdiction: this man himself mistook some points of law, and last minute paperwork was required. At several levels of government, various departments use maps that clearly indicate (incorrectly) that my father does not own the easement, and the city at one time attempted to suggest that it was frontage. And this is regarding an easement whereupon there is a well-established thicket, not a road. This brings me to the consideration that real estate agents are not lawyers, and that legal status of the easement might have been unclear or incorrectly represented when the purchase was made. Also, I think that if the road was being treated simultaneously as a liability and an obligation by whatever mix of regional law pertained, a legal confrontation would be completely understandable. I do not know or assert that any of these things are the case, but I know that easements are complicated beasts, and that a simple violation of contract may not be the only explanation here.
sqeaky 11y ago
What I gather from that is that this guy does not know how to monetize a road and/or run a public beach. Build something along side the road. Build a strip mall and rent bays to surf shops and restaurants. For the amount of money the article claimed he spent he could have afforded to build a hotel or resort.
- tlrobinson 11y ago
  The guy is a billionaire, he doesn't care about whatever measly profit he'd make from putting a strip mall there...
- aet 11y ago
  Build a strip mall? I think the value of the beach is that it lacks strip malls.
- s73v3r 11y ago
  "Build a strip mall" This is quite possibly the worst idea there is.
- declan 11y ago
  > Build a strip mall and rent bays to surf shops and restaurants The government would not allow this to happen. The California Coastal Commission prohibits any such development. I've talked to a local architect who had his plans to remodel an existing single-family home in that area scuttled by the commission. That's why, when driving south after Half Moon Bay, you encounter essentially no coastal development until you hit Santa Cruz. There are one or two shops scattered along the way but those are grandfathered in; as far as I can tell if it didn't exist 30-40 years ago, it never will. If Vinod Khosla proposed building a strip mall, anti-development activists from all of California would converge on Martin's Beach and chain themselves to the bulldozers while conducting a hunger strike while environmental groups would file at least three parallel lawsuits. Put another way, SF bay area politics are non-intuitive. (Note I'm not expressing a normative opinion about whether development should be allowed; I'm merely saying what is currently allowed.)
- sqeaky 11y ago
  It sounded like the road was longish. I meant he should put things on that road. Whatever it was could still be off the beach but monetizable. Land is usually easy monetize, even after licenses and regulations, why does this billionaire have such trouble?
jkyle 11y ago
From the article: > Khosla bought the 53-acre property for $32.5 million in 2008 and kept the beach open to the public for two years despite the fact that he was paying $500,000 to $600,000 a year in maintenance costs and liability insurance. > In 2010, after receiving county court orders -- which he believed were unfair -- to keep the beach access open 24/7 and charge visitors $2 for parking, Khosla ordered his property manager to close the gate permanently. Seems like it's not so clear cut. I mean, he was eating 500-600k a year without complaint maintaining the property for the public. That's pretty generous. Seems it was a dispute over parking and fees...and considering how trivial $2 is compared to the 500k+ he was already paying it just feels like there's a bit more to this story than "Koshla is an evil 1%'r". edit So, it was exceptionally hard finding anything from Khosla himself on the issue. But I did find a few more details on why the beach was closed. So, when he got the property he allowed the same access as the previous owners. Which was generally accessible during the day, but typically closed at night, during bad whether (often during winter), and when "inconvenient" which I assume is when property managers were on vacation or whatever. This level of access has been confirmed by the previous owners, the Deeney's, in their court testimony. So, for some unknown reason, the county issued an order to the property manager for them to a) reduce parking fees to $2 (which is what they were in the 1970's) and b) to keep the gate open 24/7. Khosla's managers/attorney's/whatever thought this was a significant historical change in access policy and so fought it, closing the property until the dispute was resolved. I got all this from the following article: http://www.mercurynews.com/san-mateo-county-times/ci_26166316/khosla-sounds-off-martins-beach-slams-news-coverage http://www.mercurynews.com/san-mateo-county-times/ci_2616631...
- dchichkov 11y ago
  Well, I guess putting armed guards to block access [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinod_Khosla#Martin.27s_Beach_dispute http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinod_Khosla#Martin.27s_Beach_d...] paying to layers and financing black PR campaigns is expensive. No surprise it could be $500-600k. Or did he actually spend it on cleaning the beach? edit: Or had this $500-600k number been pulled out of thin air, just like 70% number?
  - jkyle 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

quizotic 11y ago

and sometimes you learn about a person by working with them. Long ago, Vinod was an investor and director of two of my early companies. He was helpful, supportive, polite and wonderful.

DodgyEggplant 11y ago
People change
- DodgyEggplant 11y ago
  yet again: not agree = downvote.
  - escape_goat 11y ago
    Low quality comments are consistently downvoted without remorse. Your response added nothing substantive or interesting for people to read on the comment page. You didn't even bother to use proper syntax. By contrast, you will note that your original comment, disagreeable as it may be to the other commentator and to the other friends of Mr. Khosa, has not been downvoted.
    - simonebrunozzi 11y ago
      And I upvoted yours for the same reasons :)
    - DodgyEggplant 11y ago
      Maybe, but more downvotes were for the initial comment
      - escape_goat 11y ago
        You need to think about it this way: historically, the comment pages of HN have made for very good, diverse, and interesting reading. One learns odd and varied details about historical technological decisions, rocket engine design, et cetera... anything may come up. The commentators on Hacker News include a wide variety of domain experts, mildly historical figures, legions upon legions of extremely experienced programmers, managers, entrepreneurs, and so on. This is what has drawn most of us here. The comments, ideas, and speculations produced by persons such as myself are fine, perhaps, but frankly, they're not nearly as interesting to read. This leads us to one of the most frustrating oddities of the Hacker News website: you can't collapse the comments. If there's a tree structure of comments, every comment will take up at least a good thumb's width of screen space. The consequence of this is that every comment is an imposition on the reader. Every comment needs to be able to account for itself. Posting on Hacker News is a performance, rather than a conversation. We're on stage, whether anyone wants us there or not, and unless we're trying to write words that other people might find valuable, unless we're at least trying, then yes, we will be swiftly downvoted to oblivion by everyone, including people exactly like ourselves. There may be annoyance behind it, but there's scarcely enough thought wasted for malice. One-liners must be very informative or situationally relevant messages. And properly capitalized and punctuated. Or else they should go unwritten.
swalsh 11y ago
To be fair, being helpful to a company you have an investment in is just a good business move... it doesn't implicitly make you a "better person".
- wslh 11y ago
  I don't know Vinod Khosla personally but all people have many faces.
coleslawfail 11y ago
How long ago? He's been at this almost 30 years. He doesn't need the money. Now it's all about him. Martin's Beach is the symptom of the disease.
- glibgil 11y ago
  Is the disease greed?
  - adventured 11y ago
    Non-billionaires take actions regularly based on the notion that they are right in their course, morally and or legally. Now size that up to billionaire status. They too are likely to take actions based on thinking that they are in fact right in their decision making. The issue in that case: billionaires often tend to impact a lot of other people with their actions, because so much of what they do is outsized. My issue might be with my neighbors on a single property line marker. Or maybe they think my trashcans are encroaching on their curb area, pick the issue. Billionaires generate billionaire-size problems.
sqeaky 11y ago
Doesn't the placard at Jimmy Jon's say something like "You can't tell how nice a person is by how they treat you, watch how they treat the waiter."?
- aaronbrethorst 11y ago
  Funny placard, that: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/10/jimmy-johns-noncompete-agreement_n_7042112.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/10/jimmy-johns-noncomp...
- npizzolato 11y ago
  I don't find myself quoting Harry Potter often, but there's a really good quote in Goblet of Fire: "If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals."

mpdehaan2 11y ago

The article also indicates he was paying a very large amount in liability taxes and maintaince for a road he possibly owned (it says $500k), and was only offered the ability to charge $2 for parking to offset that. Given, I'm not sure where the $500k comes from. It also seems he was trying to restrict access to the road, not the beach. Maybe he didn't own the road, but it seems you should be able to restrict access to a road you own, but that no one owns a beach, and it didn't actually say he restricted the beach. Maybe that was the intent, but maybe it was due to problems with the cars parking along the road after leaving it open for two years. I do believe most VCs can reduce the potential of the company when the founders have a cohesive vision for it already and know how to run it, and they do have an interest in saying they are better than the others :) So it is a lot about finding those that give good advice, but don't force it, and that's incredibly hard to judge in initial conversations with any of them. I'd recommend talking to companies they are invested in and their fellow board members (i.e. the founders who created the tech) that work for companies they have invested in.

Retric 11y ago
It's very common for property owners to be required to allow access to another property. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easement Basically, he entered into a contract as part of buying property and now he does not want to abide by it. Which suggests doing business with him is a terrible idea.
- escape_goat 11y ago
  I have some relevant experience. My father owns a property with an easement, purchased from an attorney who worked in easement law, in a different jurisdiction: this man himself mistook some points of law, and last minute paperwork was required. At several levels of government, various departments use maps that clearly indicate (incorrectly) that my father does not own the easement, and the city at one time attempted to suggest that it was frontage. And this is regarding an easement whereupon there is a well-established thicket, not a road. This brings me to the consideration that real estate agents are not lawyers, and that legal status of the easement might have been unclear or incorrectly represented when the purchase was made. Also, I think that if the road was being treated simultaneously as a liability and an obligation by whatever mix of regional law pertained, a legal confrontation would be completely understandable. I do not know or assert that any of these things are the case, but I know that easements are complicated beasts, and that a simple violation of contract may not be the only explanation here.

sqeaky 11y ago

What I gather from that is that this guy does not know how to monetize a road and/or run a public beach. Build something along side the road. Build a strip mall and rent bays to surf shops and restaurants. For the amount of money the article claimed he spent he could have afforded to build a hotel or resort.

tlrobinson 11y ago
The guy is a billionaire, he doesn't care about whatever measly profit he'd make from putting a strip mall there...
aet 11y ago
Build a strip mall? I think the value of the beach is that it lacks strip malls.
s73v3r 11y ago
"Build a strip mall" This is quite possibly the worst idea there is.
declan 11y ago
> Build a strip mall and rent bays to surf shops and restaurants The government would not allow this to happen. The California Coastal Commission prohibits any such development. I've talked to a local architect who had his plans to remodel an existing single-family home in that area scuttled by the commission. That's why, when driving south after Half Moon Bay, you encounter essentially no coastal development until you hit Santa Cruz. There are one or two shops scattered along the way but those are grandfathered in; as far as I can tell if it didn't exist 30-40 years ago, it never will. If Vinod Khosla proposed building a strip mall, anti-development activists from all of California would converge on Martin's Beach and chain themselves to the bulldozers while conducting a hunger strike while environmental groups would file at least three parallel lawsuits. Put another way, SF bay area politics are non-intuitive. (Note I'm not expressing a normative opinion about whether development should be allowed; I'm merely saying what is currently allowed.)
sqeaky 11y ago
It sounded like the road was longish. I meant he should put things on that road. Whatever it was could still be off the beach but monetizable. Land is usually easy monetize, even after licenses and regulations, why does this billionaire have such trouble?

jkyle 11y ago

From the article: > Khosla bought the 53-acre property for $32.5 million in 2008 and kept the beach open to the public for two years despite the fact that he was paying $500,000 to $600,000 a year in maintenance costs and liability insurance. > In 2010, after receiving county court orders -- which he believed were unfair -- to keep the beach access open 24/7 and charge visitors $2 for parking, Khosla ordered his property manager to close the gate permanently. Seems like it's not so clear cut. I mean, he was eating 500-600k a year without complaint maintaining the property for the public. That's pretty generous. Seems it was a dispute over parking and fees...and considering how trivial $2 is compared to the 500k+ he was already paying it just feels like there's a bit more to this story than "Koshla is an evil 1%'r". edit So, it was exceptionally hard finding anything from Khosla himself on the issue. But I did find a few more details on why the beach was closed. So, when he got the property he allowed the same access as the previous owners. Which was generally accessible during the day, but typically closed at night, during bad whether (often during winter), and when "inconvenient" which I assume is when property managers were on vacation or whatever. This level of access has been confirmed by the previous owners, the Deeney's, in their court testimony. So, for some unknown reason, the county issued an order to the property manager for them to a) reduce parking fees to $2 (which is what they were in the 1970's) and b) to keep the gate open 24/7. Khosla's managers/attorney's/whatever thought this was a significant historical change in access policy and so fought it, closing the property until the dispute was resolved. I got all this from the following article: http://www.mercurynews.com/san-mateo-county-times/ci_26166316/khosla-sounds-off-martins-beach-slams-news-coverage http://www.mercurynews.com/san-mateo-county-times/ci_2616631...

dchichkov 11y ago
Well, I guess putting armed guards to block access [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinod_Khosla#Martin.27s_Beach_dispute http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinod_Khosla#Martin.27s_Beach_d...] paying to layers and financing black PR campaigns is expensive. No surprise it could be $500-600k. Or did he actually spend it on cleaning the beach? edit: Or had this $500-600k number been pulled out of thin air, just like 70% number?
- jkyle 11y ago