As a co-founder who got screwed on a large acquisition, it makes me happy to see that Snapchat finally settled. However, a settlement doesn't change the fact that Evan Spiegel really went out of his way to intentionally screw the guy that actually invented Snapchat's model - and seemed to enjoy doing it. He's definitely not someone I'd ever do business with.
That's all totally besides the point. The suit argued that there was a verbal agreement on three equal shares and that the plaintiff was cut out of the deal when the other two co-founders went and created a new company split 60/40 between them.
I may be mis-interpreting all this but if that's true then that alone would likely be enough to give him a very credible claim.
You receive equity because you have agreed to receive that equity in return for something, whatever that something is. If after that the other party breaks that agreement in some way then you can sue them for breach of contract. If the agreement is only verbal then it will be an uphill battle but in these days of email, text messages and skype an awful lot of that stuff is logged to the point where it could be used to support the existence or non-existence of such a verbal agreement.
So whether to you he's 'not even close to being a co-founder' is not important, what mattered is that they apparently agreed that he was a co-founder and would get an equal share in the to be formed company.
What's more frightening to me is how many VCs and other investors who went along with the charade and did not care that this criminal was a representative of them.
Investors in general have limited say in what the founders arrange amongst themselves. For all we know the settlement was reached after pressure from investors or maybe the exact opposite happened.
I'm an investor in a small company (< 50 employees) that went through a very rough time in the beginning because of co-founder issues and it got resolved mostly because of investors working hard to save the company from going under.
You could cynically conclude that that was done to protect our investment (and that might even be the right conclusion).
What founders have been up to is not always immediately clear when you invest, sometimes the proverbial skeleton in the cupboard can be hidden quite well. I make a living digging such stuff up so I was fairly well prepared but the degree to which these things can blow up still surprised me.
Whoa, slow your roll. i) this is a civil matter, ii) both parties settled, with probably no admission of any wrongdoing by either party. Throwing around labels such as "criminal" is not something one does lightly. If you're not careful you could be soon facing a civil action of your own for libel.
"I wouldn't think they'd add a sentence like this to their press release if his only contribution was only an idea."
That's exactly the sort of thing that was likely specified in the settlement agreement itself, probably in exchange for a lower financial cost of settling.
The founders didn't think he had the technical expertise to make the app so they didn't involve him in that. A legal statement, made to placate a litigant does not change that.
I wonder how such things become possible. As co-founders shouldn't you have a written (and lawyer checked) agreement on how the company is shared amongst you?
How can one betray the other besides of letting him/her unknowingly sign an unfortunate contract?
Projects like that are usually made between friends and aren't really expected to become THAT big. Plus, it doesn't really matter, they took the guy out of the business and took away his rightful part of it. Good thing they settled.
"At this point, Brown and the Individual Defendants…entered into an explicit oral agreement as to their respective interests in their joint undertaking to develop the Application…That explicit agreement was that their interests in the venture would be equally distributed, i.e. each of them would have 1/3 ownership and profit interests in the joint venture/partnership."
Yeah, verbal agreements aren't worth squat. At best, you get a settlement, at worst you get nothing. I'm surprised these guys didn't sign contracts amongst themselves.
Agreed - It seems like verbal agreements are just invitations to future abuse. Humans are very good at ignoring limitations when convenient. Codifying them is the only way we keep things fair.
Contracts (written just as much as verbal) don't magically enforce themselves. They just provide evidence of the substance of an agreement in the legal action when one side thinks they were violated.
And friends starting something together often don't anticipate it becoming a source of friction in the future, and don't do what you'd expect people in an arms-length relationship to do. Sure, anyone whose been around the block once will likely have learned -- and lots of people will learn before they've been around the block themselves. But quite a lot of people won't, or will learn but think that it doesn't really apply to the little project their doing with their friends, and by the time they realize that they should have, they'll be enough money already involved that what one side sees as a "reasonable division" will be what the other side sees as "cheating me out of what I am due".
A few friends of mine saw Evan speak at Stanford this past spring. He was in a room with Eric Schmidt and Sam Altman (IIRC) and his attitude towards them was nothing short of smug. I don't remember the specifics of what he said but my friends said he basically "told Eric, Sam and other prominent VCs on the panel off because he thought he was more successful than them".
Which is nothing. We don't have the context and it's always amazing how people, even just observers with no skin in the game, will have wildly divergent interpretations of the same events. There's definitely some interpretation going on here as Snapchat guy almost assuredly didn't say "I'm more successful than you".
It was a room full of Stanford students, many of which had zero context of who he was or what his reputation was. They were there to learn from successful VCs/Founders/etc and every student I spoke with generally agreed he was smug, off putting and dismissive not only to the students but also the other panel members.
Given it's consistent with the public's perception of how Snapchat operates, I'm simply reinforcing the parent comments sentiment.
You don't need expertise in a particular profession to come to the conclusion that someone is being smug, rude, etc. If I saw someone on the street being disrespectful, is it unfair for me to come to that conclusion because I don't fully understand their field of work?
I didn't say anything about the field of work, so I'm not sure what you're getting at. We don't have the context of the conversation or panel in which the supposedly dismissive and/or smug comments occurred and we don't have enough information to make our own conclusion on the behavior or the reliability of the assessment given here.
There are many reasons someone may feel that a speaker is smug. Some may be warranted and some may not. Since we don't know what happened and can't evaluate whether the parent's friends made a correct assessment or not, with this type of matter, it's best to just ignore it entirely. It has nothing to do with our familiarity with anyone's line of work.
Anecdotes wherein the spokesman wasn't even present intrigue me, particularly when it's gossip about notable figures. I'm not sure what value you expect us to find in a retelling of your friend's subjective experience. Hell, for all we know, you could be making the entire story up.
One time I saw Sergey Brin be mean to someone. Take that for what it's worth. Maybe he's EVIL.
Don't read my comment as defending anyone. I really couldn't care less about Evan Spiegel, so I don't dance on his settlement like most comments here are doing, but this whole TMZ "we got video of Evan being smug at a panel, CLICK HERE" comment thread is just the worst of this industry. Ask yourself if you've contributed to life in the manner you expect as you typed out that comment.
I've heard nothing but bad things about him from people who have "experienced" him person. It's a shame but douchey, sociopathic behavior is often rewarded in our system.
Seems a bit comical that the article claims this to be the first disappearing photo app. I created and launched one myself a year before Snapchat started...
The normal way for start founders to receive equity, is only from one or more of these 3 things:
- For hours worked, based on the vesting and usually the hours must be beyond the cliff or you get nothing.
- If you built a crucial part of the IP that the company needs to buy from you with equity.
- Cash invested up front - less common.
He fulfilled none of those. Not even close to being a cofounder. Ideas aren't included among those.
Have you seen their shareholder agreement? Does one even exist?
Vesting is quite common in the EU, but only when it is agreed upon by all parties. If you're founding a business on equal equity based on the capital deposited you get those shares up front, any additional shares emitted subject to vesting/shareholder agreements, payments and so on.
What you agree on matters, not what you later think you should have agreed on.
Anyway, I note the case has been settled and that you either have some hidden knowledge about this case or that your position is at odds with reality as currently on display.
I don't understand why you're coming at this from a US vs EU angle. I've worked in both as well, have had a company in the US, have had a company in Canada as well as several in Europe.
Agreements tend to be legally binding on both sides of the Atlantic, if my experience is any guide then the US is much stronger on contracts and agreements than Europe, but apparently we we're not going to agree on that.
What matters is that we're talking about a very specific case, not just your experience or general matters. And that in that specific case which the linked article talks about there was more than just smoke about there being 3, not 2 co-founders to snapchat and that one of them got unfairly cut out of the deal.
What the US norm is in such cases is not relevant, if you agree on a three way split then that is what you should do. If someone contributes to your start-up in a non-material but essential way then you can decide to reward them or not, but once you've made a commitment towards sharing in the proceeds you can't later backpedal on that.
And there is nothing European about that. Case in point: this lawsuit is going down in the US.
You seem to be really stuck on this point. EU economies suffer because we take contracts extremely literally?
I don't know why you would bring this subject up in several unrelated treads but that's something you can probably answer better than I can. This thread has reached enough levels for me.
Situation: someone accidentally copy-pastes personal data into a comment. Someone else replies, "you probably should remove that". The first person can no longer remove it.
I find it annoying when people delete posts as well, but there are valuable reasons to do it.
If he was banned because some newbie (or anybody else) demanded it I'd happily join him in exile. Though I very highly doubt that would ever happen. And I'm at odds with Thomas on plenty of subjects, that doesn't mean there should be demands to squelch those that we disagree with.
I would not even want to see people banned for asking other people to be banned. It's just totally against the grain of the community. I read back some more through 'compare's' comments and he did indeed have a run-in with Thomas so you may be on to something there.
You really need to stop the personal attacks and trying to raise a downvote brigade against my comments, just because we disagreed about a law and culture topic.
I wish the site admins would place a clear written policy against these and other personal attacks next to every comment box.
It's worth noting that you rarely end up with more than -1 or -2 votes. Write a single popular comment and it more than makes up for it.
I'm not sure what your comment about "people linking to old comments" means. Either you stand by your comments or you don't.
Edit. The comment I replied was by the user "compare"[1] and said the following:
In this case, it was people linking to old comments, to try to make the attacks more personal, and attempting vote brigading.
I wish we could ban most of the top active commenters on hacker news. They get controlling and territorial.
One could argue that the most valuable feedback for a writer is on comments that are rght on the boundary between their viewpoint and alternate viewpoints. Culturally, it would be more valuable if people replied with their reason for disagreement.
Downvotes are clearly intended for moderation (visibility change of font), but are easy to misuse for passive debate.
You're right, of course, but if young and stupid entrepreneurs say something like "We'll split the company evenly between us" and any semblance of work happens then there will eventually come a day when they'd told that the law does not treat that statement as a code comment. Triply so if they are just smart enough to cut themselves and memorialize their agreement on paper.
It got great traction and decent press coverage, in fact I was a bit surprised when journalists decided to go with a nudity angle. In the end I never pursued it further, due to another startup I was working on at the time.
Its true that it's not the idea but the execution that matters for any startup. However in this case, snapchats virality was in the idea(even if it has been done before). The execution side, vs photo apps like Instagram, was simpler and less complicated. Moreover, he was involved in the initial development of the app. He deserved better.
While I might agree that contributing a simple idea to a startup isn't generally worth a stake in it, driving that startup with a broad, complex vision over its development certainly is.
Unfortunately, I've met founders that equate the latter with the former, and think it's fine to steal off with "ideas" that people have worked on for years because "well, ideas have no value, only implementation does." If the "idea" is several paragraphs (or even pages) long, and includes comprehensive implementation details, it has value. No question.
Now, SnapChat, I agree, there isn't really much going on there beyond a one-sentence pitch. But not all ideas are that simple, and the complex ones are given inherent value by their complexity.
I don't think it really matters at all what exactly you did if there was an agreement that you get a third of the equity.
Reggie's mistake was not getting it in contractual form. However, clearly the law still takes clearly communicated pacts between friends somewhat seriously, as it forced Snapchat to settle.
I was going to link to the mandatory reading of Joel Spolsky's canonical answer on splitting shares in startups between founders and beyond. But as Stack Exchange's policy of shuttering less popular subsites that is now lost in its original form :( It was originally here http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/6949/forming-a-new-s... Is there a good reproduction elsewhere?
This is such a common question here and elsewhere that I will attempt to write the world’s most canonical answer to this question. Hopefully in the future when someone on answers.onstartups asks how to split up the ownership of their new company, you can simply point to this answer.
The most important principle: Fairness, and the perception of fairness, is much more valuable than owning a large stake. Almost everything that can go wrong in a startup will go wrong, and one of the biggest things that can go wrong is huge, angry, shouting matches between the founders as to who worked harder, who owns more, whose idea was it anyway, etc. That is why I would always rather split a new company 50-50 with a friend than insist on owning 60% because “it was my idea,” or because “I was more experienced” or anything else. Why? Because if I split the company 60-40, the company is going to fail when we argue ourselves to death. And if you just say, “to heck with it, we can NEVER figure out what the correct split is, so let’s just be pals and go 50-50,” you’ll stay friends and the company will survive.
Thus, I present you with Joel’s Totally Fair Method to Divide Up The Ownership of Any Startup.
For simplicity sake, I’m going to start by assuming that you are not going to raise venture capital and you are not going to have outside investors. Later, I’ll explain how to deal with venture capital, but for now assume no investors.
Also for simplicity sake, let’s temporarily assume that the founders all quit their jobs and start working on the new company full time at the same time. Later, I’ll explain how to deal with founders who do not start at the same time.
Here’s the principle. As your company grows, you tend to add people in “layers”.
The top layer is the first founder or founders. There may be 1, 2, 3, or more of you, but you all start working about the same time, and you all take the same risk… quitting your jobs to go work for a new and unproven company.
The second layer is the first real employees. By the time you hire this layer, you’ve got cash coming in from somewhere (investors or customers–doesn’t matter). These people didn’t take as much risk because they got a salary from day one, and honestly, they didn’t start the company, they joined it as a job.
The third layer are later employees. By the time they joined the company, it was going pretty well.
For many companies, each “layer” will be approximately one year long. By the time your company is big enough to sell to Google or go public or whatever, you probably have about 6 layers: the founders and roughly five layers of employees. Each successive layer is larger. There might be two founders, five early employees in layer 2, 25 employees in layer 3, and 200 employees in layer 4. The later layers took less risk.
OK, now here’s how you use that information:
The founders should end up with about 50% of the company, total. Each of the next five layers should end up with about 10% of the company, split equally among everyone in the layer.
Example:
Two founders start the company. They each take 2500 shares. There are 5000 shares outstanding, so each founder owns half.
They hire four employees in year one. These four employees each take 250 shares. There are 6000 shares outstanding.
They hire another 20 employees in year two. Each one takes 50 shares. They get fewer shares because they took less risk, and they get 50 shares because we’re giving each layer 1000 shares to divide up.
By the time the company has six layers, you have given out 10,000 shares. Each founder ends up owning 25%. Each employee layer owns 10% collectively. The earliest employees who took the most risk own the most shares.
Make sense? You don’t have to follow this exact formula but...
Good read, but the IOU plan is nonsensical... cash in one hand, or an IOU for the same amount in the other, issued by an entity with a very high likelihood of failure? What? Maybe if the IOU started accumulating 20% interest.
having debt, high rising debt ... don't think that would play well with early investors... and without early investors it is pretty hard for a startup to live to see the late investors.
Sure, you'd want to be compensated for time and risk, but on the other hand you don't want to saddle the company with a ton of debt. It depends on how much money you're talking about. Either way, the point remains that it shouldn't be paid for with equity.
I think having the founders own a total of 50% is a seemingly high risk but that is totally opinion based. If the other entire 50% rise up in agreement could they halt the company? Wouldn't 60-40 in favor of the founders give them a little more leverage because after all it is their shared idea/vision/etc and they should be shouldering a large part of the risk.
If you're ever in a situation where the entire remainder of the company, investors included, are wanting the company to go in a completely different direction then I would have to agree that something is terribly wrong. Maybe 50% is enough. Maybe I'm bringing up a hypothetical that has no basis in reality.
If you're especially worried about it, you can pick one co-founder (perhaps the CEO) and give him +1 share so the money is still relatively even but the cofounders can outvote the rest. In practice I think once you have a board, it's more important to control the board than worry about base share distribution.
I've found this sentiment is very prominent among engineers (myself included) and not-so-prominent among anyone else. It seems the general populous believes 90% of the work is "thinking up a great idea". The reality is that almost any annoyance or inconvenience in your life could be turned into a profitable company. There is an unlimited supply of ideas that could, hypothetically, be developed into a profitable company. That's one of the reasons new profitable companies can keep getting started, even though there are 6 billion other people on earth who could've beat you to the punch.
I just wonder why that knowledge is so rare. I understand engineers understand it intimately since they spend years making these things come to life, but you'd think it'd be at least a little more visible to non-engineers.
I recall seeing somewhere that a problem with the website was that it was declining. The average numbers were on the lower end of the acceptable range, but that was averaging high early activity with low late activity, which is not a good pattern. I could be totally misremembering, though.
The value of the company is already so high that much of the upside is removed. You really have to believe in the company as a whole to make that commitment.
depends on what you want out of the job.. Are you looking to establish yourself as a good engineer?
Hoping to make big money?
Looking for a good salary, perks etc?
It's interesting the news on Tinder and Snap Chat came around the same time of Apple’s new iPhones and iWatch release. In fact, it's no coincidence they must have been trying to hide behind the noise.
It was smart of them to release bad news at the same time as the apple announcement. Not many have talked about the Tinder Issue and Snapchat’s settlement, as a result.
Money. Greed. It destroys more friendships (and marriages) than anything else.
So what's the lesson here? Don't be careless. I don't care what the idea (startup) is - get the details on paper. True, 99% of startups fail, but you don't want to be in that 1% that's making the lawyers rich.
I think the other lesson here is to consciously know when you cross the line away from an amount of money you're willing to walk away from to save the friendship, and be sure that's what you want.
>> Money. Greed. It destroys more friendships (and marriages) than anything else.
This a thousand time.
My first hard earned rule of thumb? Don't do business with your friends. Lost relationships, bitterness, and great financial loss is never worth it. I got burned really bad and spent the better part of four years trying to get my money back.
That's different. Your spouse's and yours financial interests are most likely aligned - you are both bringing in money to one family, so most likely there are no arguments who gets how much. With friends, you and your friend are competing for the same financial pie.
I am almost the complete opposite. I only start companies with friends and while there have been some issues, it has served me very well.
I think it partly depends on the definition of friend. I don't start companies with acquaintances, I start them with people that I love and respect.
When you do that, starting a company becomes a really special endeavor.
This is very relevant for me at the moment because I am starting a new company and the person that I am hounding to be the founding CTO is a "newer friend" (we have only known each other for 4 years or so) but I am convinced that we will be a great team.
My advice is to start companies to work with people you love vs. trying to make a bunch of money. It's such a great way to "work" and greed will have a hard time breaking that.
Not Apple's fault per se, just the Silicon Valley equivalent of a "Friday Night News Dump" that's common in industry and government.[1] It happened to be Apple this time, but it could have just as easily been a Google acquisition, some new Amazon product, basically anything guaranteed to get most of the attention and press.
Back in the day, I was a co-founder in a company, started by my advisor's wife. She called us (me and a colleague) to their house, and promised the two of us 20% ownership (and the remaining 60% she kept).
I worked like a dog for about 1.5 years, spending nights and weekends getting it off the ground (the business was website creation and other backend stuff). We managed to get the ear of one of the largest grocery chains in the country, and their VP came over to talk to us. My ideas were the core of the presentation. As soon as it looked like it might take off, she started cutting me out. Then one day, the locks were changed in the office!
As her husband was still my advisor, I couldn't do anything but grumble and continue working on my dissertation.
A few years later, the company was sold for $30MM.
I thought about it after I graduated. The problem is: in the initial years, people ask for recommendations from your advisor; and as a PhD, you are basically tied to your advisor for life (people will always ask: who was your advisor?).
After some thought, I decided to give it a rest and move on. I had learnt a valuable (and very pricey) lesson: always take things in writing.
I think I'd take 20% of $30MM, even including a potentially difficult court battle, over a good rec from a PhD advisor (which, as others have pointed out, is less important than you seem to suggest).
We all do. I've got several -- one involving me and two more involving others -- that are so weird I'd have to tone them down quite a bit to make them believable.
After the 3rd mention of Apple before the story intro was completed, in an article that (by all appearances) isn't actually about Apple at all, I decided that this just isn't a news source worth reading.
114 comments
[ 723 ms ] story [ 3816 ms ] threadhttp://www.businessinsider.com/snapchat-lawsuit-video-deposi...
I may be mis-interpreting all this but if that's true then that alone would likely be enough to give him a very credible claim.
You receive equity because you have agreed to receive that equity in return for something, whatever that something is. If after that the other party breaks that agreement in some way then you can sue them for breach of contract. If the agreement is only verbal then it will be an uphill battle but in these days of email, text messages and skype an awful lot of that stuff is logged to the point where it could be used to support the existence or non-existence of such a verbal agreement.
So whether to you he's 'not even close to being a co-founder' is not important, what mattered is that they apparently agreed that he was a co-founder and would get an equal share in the to be formed company.
I'm an investor in a small company (< 50 employees) that went through a very rough time in the beginning because of co-founder issues and it got resolved mostly because of investors working hard to save the company from going under.
You could cynically conclude that that was done to protect our investment (and that might even be the right conclusion).
What founders have been up to is not always immediately clear when you invest, sometimes the proverbial skeleton in the cupboard can be hidden quite well. I make a living digging such stuff up so I was fairly well prepared but the degree to which these things can blow up still surprised me.
Nothing unique (disappearing photo apps existed before, see the rest of the thread).
No programming expertise, he didn't make anything.
“We acknowledge Reggie’s contribution to the creation of Snapchat and appreciate his work in getting the application off the ground.”
I wouldn't think they'd add a sentence like this to their press release if his only contribution was only an idea.
That's exactly the sort of thing that was likely specified in the settlement agreement itself, probably in exchange for a lower financial cost of settling.
How can one betray the other besides of letting him/her unknowingly sign an unfortunate contract?
http://www.businessinsider.com/reggie-brown-sues-snapchat-in...
Yeah, verbal agreements aren't worth squat. At best, you get a settlement, at worst you get nothing. I'm surprised these guys didn't sign contracts amongst themselves.
And friends starting something together often don't anticipate it becoming a source of friction in the future, and don't do what you'd expect people in an arms-length relationship to do. Sure, anyone whose been around the block once will likely have learned -- and lots of people will learn before they've been around the block themselves. But quite a lot of people won't, or will learn but think that it doesn't really apply to the little project their doing with their friends, and by the time they realize that they should have, they'll be enough money already involved that what one side sees as a "reasonable division" will be what the other side sees as "cheating me out of what I am due".
Take that for what it's worth.
Which is nothing. We don't have the context and it's always amazing how people, even just observers with no skin in the game, will have wildly divergent interpretations of the same events. There's definitely some interpretation going on here as Snapchat guy almost assuredly didn't say "I'm more successful than you".
Given it's consistent with the public's perception of how Snapchat operates, I'm simply reinforcing the parent comments sentiment.
There are many reasons someone may feel that a speaker is smug. Some may be warranted and some may not. Since we don't know what happened and can't evaluate whether the parent's friends made a correct assessment or not, with this type of matter, it's best to just ignore it entirely. It has nothing to do with our familiarity with anyone's line of work.
I took that as referring to field expertise. If that wasn't the intent, my mistake.
I get what you're saying, but there isn't video documentation of everything, so at some point you take the words and recollections of others.
One time I saw Sergey Brin be mean to someone. Take that for what it's worth. Maybe he's EVIL.
Don't read my comment as defending anyone. I really couldn't care less about Evan Spiegel, so I don't dance on his settlement like most comments here are doing, but this whole TMZ "we got video of Evan being smug at a panel, CLICK HERE" comment thread is just the worst of this industry. Ask yourself if you've contributed to life in the manner you expect as you typed out that comment.
Take that for what it’s worth.
The normal way for start founders to receive equity, is only from one or more of these 3 things:
- For hours worked, based on the vesting and usually the hours must be beyond the cliff or you get nothing.
- If you built a crucial part of the IP that the company needs to buy from you with equity.
- Cash invested up front - less common.
He fulfilled none of those. Not even close to being a cofounder. Ideas aren't included among those.
I wrote a longish answer to your comment here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8295469
Vesting is quite common in the EU, but only when it is agreed upon by all parties. If you're founding a business on equal equity based on the capital deposited you get those shares up front, any additional shares emitted subject to vesting/shareholder agreements, payments and so on.
What you agree on matters, not what you later think you should have agreed on.
Anyway, I note the case has been settled and that you either have some hidden knowledge about this case or that your position is at odds with reality as currently on display.
Agreements tend to be legally binding on both sides of the Atlantic, if my experience is any guide then the US is much stronger on contracts and agreements than Europe, but apparently we we're not going to agree on that.
What matters is that we're talking about a very specific case, not just your experience or general matters. And that in that specific case which the linked article talks about there was more than just smoke about there being 3, not 2 co-founders to snapchat and that one of them got unfairly cut out of the deal.
What the US norm is in such cases is not relevant, if you agree on a three way split then that is what you should do. If someone contributes to your start-up in a non-material but essential way then you can decide to reward them or not, but once you've made a commitment towards sharing in the proceeds you can't later backpedal on that.
And there is nothing European about that. Case in point: this lawsuit is going down in the US.
You seem to be really stuck on this point. EU economies suffer because we take contracts extremely literally?
I don't know why you would bring this subject up in several unrelated treads but that's something you can probably answer better than I can. This thread has reached enough levels for me.
But the downvotes trickle in even after you realized that your arguments, or emotions were not quite up there.
Idea: Functionality to mark your own post with "I concede", keep it grey like downvoted posts and block further voting.
Assuming I'm on it, let's see the rest of your list of HN'ers you'd like to see banned.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
I find it annoying when people delete posts as well, but there are valuable reasons to do it.
Only because I disagree with his views on everything (besides crypto).
Just kidding. If it weren't for the tptaceks of internet, I'd have no reason to ever leave a comment.
I would not even want to see people banned for asking other people to be banned. It's just totally against the grain of the community. I read back some more through 'compare's' comments and he did indeed have a run-in with Thomas so you may be on to something there.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7493419
I wish the site admins would place a clear written policy against these and other personal attacks next to every comment box.
It's worth noting that you rarely end up with more than -1 or -2 votes. Write a single popular comment and it more than makes up for it.
I'm not sure what your comment about "people linking to old comments" means. Either you stand by your comments or you don't.
Edit. The comment I replied was by the user "compare"[1] and said the following:
In this case, it was people linking to old comments, to try to make the attacks more personal, and attempting vote brigading. I wish we could ban most of the top active commenters on hacker news. They get controlling and territorial.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=compare
Downvotes are clearly intended for moderation (visibility change of font), but are easy to misuse for passive debate.
Of course, you can also stand by your original post, which is something I've done sometimes.
Unfortunately, I've met founders that equate the latter with the former, and think it's fine to steal off with "ideas" that people have worked on for years because "well, ideas have no value, only implementation does." If the "idea" is several paragraphs (or even pages) long, and includes comprehensive implementation details, it has value. No question.
Now, SnapChat, I agree, there isn't really much going on there beyond a one-sentence pitch. But not all ideas are that simple, and the complex ones are given inherent value by their complexity.
Reggie's mistake was not getting it in contractual form. However, clearly the law still takes clearly communicated pacts between friends somewhat seriously, as it forced Snapchat to settle.
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This is such a common question here and elsewhere that I will attempt to write the world’s most canonical answer to this question. Hopefully in the future when someone on answers.onstartups asks how to split up the ownership of their new company, you can simply point to this answer.
The most important principle: Fairness, and the perception of fairness, is much more valuable than owning a large stake. Almost everything that can go wrong in a startup will go wrong, and one of the biggest things that can go wrong is huge, angry, shouting matches between the founders as to who worked harder, who owns more, whose idea was it anyway, etc. That is why I would always rather split a new company 50-50 with a friend than insist on owning 60% because “it was my idea,” or because “I was more experienced” or anything else. Why? Because if I split the company 60-40, the company is going to fail when we argue ourselves to death. And if you just say, “to heck with it, we can NEVER figure out what the correct split is, so let’s just be pals and go 50-50,” you’ll stay friends and the company will survive.
Thus, I present you with Joel’s Totally Fair Method to Divide Up The Ownership of Any Startup.
For simplicity sake, I’m going to start by assuming that you are not going to raise venture capital and you are not going to have outside investors. Later, I’ll explain how to deal with venture capital, but for now assume no investors.
Also for simplicity sake, let’s temporarily assume that the founders all quit their jobs and start working on the new company full time at the same time. Later, I’ll explain how to deal with founders who do not start at the same time.
Here’s the principle. As your company grows, you tend to add people in “layers”.
The top layer is the first founder or founders. There may be 1, 2, 3, or more of you, but you all start working about the same time, and you all take the same risk… quitting your jobs to go work for a new and unproven company. The second layer is the first real employees. By the time you hire this layer, you’ve got cash coming in from somewhere (investors or customers–doesn’t matter). These people didn’t take as much risk because they got a salary from day one, and honestly, they didn’t start the company, they joined it as a job. The third layer are later employees. By the time they joined the company, it was going pretty well. For many companies, each “layer” will be approximately one year long. By the time your company is big enough to sell to Google or go public or whatever, you probably have about 6 layers: the founders and roughly five layers of employees. Each successive layer is larger. There might be two founders, five early employees in layer 2, 25 employees in layer 3, and 200 employees in layer 4. The later layers took less risk.
OK, now here’s how you use that information:
The founders should end up with about 50% of the company, total. Each of the next five layers should end up with about 10% of the company, split equally among everyone in the layer.
Example:
Two founders start the company. They each take 2500 shares. There are 5000 shares outstanding, so each founder owns half. They hire four employees in year one. These four employees each take 250 shares. There are 6000 shares outstanding. They hire another 20 employees in year two. Each one takes 50 shares. They get fewer shares because they took less risk, and they get 50 shares because we’re giving each layer 1000 shares to divide up. By the time the company has six layers, you have given out 10,000 shares. Each founder ends up owning 25%. Each employee layer owns 10% collectively. The earliest employees who took the most risk own the most shares. Make sense? You don’t have to follow this exact formula but...
If you're ever in a situation where the entire remainder of the company, investors included, are wanting the company to go in a completely different direction then I would have to agree that something is terribly wrong. Maybe 50% is enough. Maybe I'm bringing up a hypothetical that has no basis in reality.
I've found this sentiment is very prominent among engineers (myself included) and not-so-prominent among anyone else. It seems the general populous believes 90% of the work is "thinking up a great idea". The reality is that almost any annoyance or inconvenience in your life could be turned into a profitable company. There is an unlimited supply of ideas that could, hypothetically, be developed into a profitable company. That's one of the reasons new profitable companies can keep getting started, even though there are 6 billion other people on earth who could've beat you to the punch.
I just wonder why that knowledge is so rare. I understand engineers understand it intimately since they spend years making these things come to life, but you'd think it'd be at least a little more visible to non-engineers.
Or just get a good salary/benefits/etc
It's pretty clear it happened. Is there anything else to say about it?
(Personally, I think the Tinder thing is more outrageous than the Snapchat thing, and it was a bigger drama when it first surfaced.)
So what's the lesson here? Don't be careless. I don't care what the idea (startup) is - get the details on paper. True, 99% of startups fail, but you don't want to be in that 1% that's making the lawyers rich.
This a thousand time.
My first hard earned rule of thumb? Don't do business with your friends. Lost relationships, bitterness, and great financial loss is never worth it. I got burned really bad and spent the better part of four years trying to get my money back.
Since then, it's just something I live by.
But I've been in business with my spouse for over a decade now.
I think it partly depends on the definition of friend. I don't start companies with acquaintances, I start them with people that I love and respect.
When you do that, starting a company becomes a really special endeavor.
This is very relevant for me at the moment because I am starting a new company and the person that I am hounding to be the founding CTO is a "newer friend" (we have only known each other for 4 years or so) but I am convinced that we will be a great team.
My advice is to start companies to work with people you love vs. trying to make a bunch of money. It's such a great way to "work" and greed will have a hard time breaking that.
[1] - http://www.rff.org/Publications/Pages/PublicationDetails.asp...
I have an experience...
I think we all do! ;-)
Back in the day, I was a co-founder in a company, started by my advisor's wife. She called us (me and a colleague) to their house, and promised the two of us 20% ownership (and the remaining 60% she kept).
I worked like a dog for about 1.5 years, spending nights and weekends getting it off the ground (the business was website creation and other backend stuff). We managed to get the ear of one of the largest grocery chains in the country, and their VP came over to talk to us. My ideas were the core of the presentation. As soon as it looked like it might take off, she started cutting me out. Then one day, the locks were changed in the office!
As her husband was still my advisor, I couldn't do anything but grumble and continue working on my dissertation.
A few years later, the company was sold for $30MM.
After some thought, I decided to give it a rest and move on. I had learnt a valuable (and very pricey) lesson: always take things in writing.
Now she finally wins her case and its like a blip on the radar? Pretty sad if you ask me.