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Ask HN: Look at the lawsuits on Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook, what went wrong?

11 points by iworkforthem ↗ HN
How many people try to claim Facebook already? Is it something that Mark Zuckerberg did wrongly when building his team or product?

If it happen to him, it could happen to us.

9 comments

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jrsmith1279
IF the allegations against Mark Zuckerburg are true then the answer to your question is don't be shady. From the sounds of things Mark may have done some shady things when he was building Facebook, never thinking that it would get as huge as it is and that those things would come back to bite him. I think that the Winklevoss lawsuit is BS, but the one from Paul Ceglia has me on the fence. The fact that he's an ex-con and waited 7 years to come forward makes it sound like it's BS, but the emails are very convincing.

On the other hand, when you're on top everyone will be gunning for you, trying to find a way to get their piece of the pie. Money makes people do crazy things and the thought of being able to sue Facebook and get a multi-million dollar settlement will bring people with allegations that they somehow owe them money.

keiferski
How are 7-year old emails from an ex-con convincing? The only "authority" that thinks they are convincing are some editors on BusinessWeek and Reuters.
jrsmith1279
Have you read them? I'm not denying that it's easy to fake emails, but if you really pay attention to how the emails are written and how natural the flow of conversation between them is then you can see why they're convincing.
ceejayoz
Con-men get pretty good at being convincing. It's something of a job requirement.
kerben
Not sure what you found convincing - it certainly screamed doctored conversation to me...
bdclimber14
The convincing authority is the plaintiff's law firm, which has tasked their digital forensics team with analyzing the documents and concluded that it is authentic and has taken the case on. It's not just BusinessWeek and Reuters.
iworkforthem
How is it always ex-founder/ex-developer raising all these lawsuits? Do I get everyone in the team to sign NDA, etc?
Kallikrates
I don't think you understand what an NDA is.
SlipperySlope
Let's assume the worst case in order to answer your question in the most interesting way - namely that Mark Zuckerberg enabled these lawsuits and that they somehow have merit.

Back in 2003, Zuckerberg was very smart, a hacker, ambitious, but most importantly - inexperienced.

1. He was desperate for money to fund the infrastructure his startup required. His lack of experience allowed him to give far too much equity to Paul Ceglia - 50% and to Eduardo Saverin 30% - for their non-technical contributions. Friends and family. Mark Zuckerberg has learned greatly from these errors and from the advice of Sean Parker and is today well known as startup founder who has kept control of his company despite several rounds of VC investments.

2. Regarding the Winkelvoss twins, Mark Zuckerberg was too concerned about their possible competition with his idea, and unnecessarily stalled them with misleading information about his progress on their behalf. Inexperience caused this misconduct. Regarding stealing their idea, his inexperience permitted him to inspect their proprietary source code, even though he wrote TheFaceBook.com from scratch using PHP and so forth.

Lesson A: I believe the current lean startup methodology adequately covers the financial errors of Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook startup: Obtain the minimal funds to develop your startup from your own savings, friends and family and from angel investors using progressive convincing prototypes such that the least amount of equity is given to early stage investors.

Lesson B. Use Non-disclosure agreements when inspecting someone else's proprietary code, and when allowing someone to inspect your code or any other proprietary aspect of your startup.