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Comment by hashkb | Hacker News Reader

Because you're waiting to maximize your leverage and make a play for yourself. That's a bad quality in a teammate.

Assuming Jeremy's story is true, then by the time he exercised that strategy he'd already by forced out by his co-founder and was no longer a "teammate".

I don't think it's fair to judge the ethics of a person by how nicely they respond to being screwed over.

So is cutting someone out of a company. My point is that this probably became an emotional issue. If that's the case, it's not hard to see how someone would wait for an opportune moment to assert ownership.

But, since we don't really know all the facts, if this was a mutual parting of ways, then I agree that it's a terrible thing to do.

The bottom line is we really don't know what happened. I can at least see how a reasonable person could walk this path if they feel they've been maligned.

I think you can fire people without it making you a bad founder. At least, I hope so.

And I think you can demand the compensation you believe is legally due without being considered a greedy selfish asshole.

How is that not greedy and selfish?

...Because you have an agreement with someone that you were a 50/50 co-founder, and that agreement is on paper? Sorry, are you privy to some kind of proof that invalidates Guillory's central evidentiary claim -- in the same way that Zuckerburg and Facebook were able to show that Paul Ceglia fabricated a contract -- or are you just arguing from circular reasoning that Guillory is a greedy asshole and thus his claims that he was unjustly forced out must, QED, be false?

I think the claim is that demanding what is rightfully yours is greedy and selfish. I don't know whether I agree in this case (probably not), but there have been cases in my life where I do agree.

That is correct.

It's that "rightfully yours" bit that really bothers me. Where does that come from and why is it so obviously rightfully yours? It takes some gumption to assume you're in the right. This land is rightfully mine because I bought it from someone else who genocided a people, but okay great, it's rightfully mine, I feel super great about it.

Legal documents are part of a negotiation, not a casual conversation. If one side says they owe you nothing, you come in saying they owe you everything. You meet in the middle.

Same as with patents and everything else.

The one's filing them and demanding what's rightfully theirs are selfish, the one's not filing patents are less selfish.

To you and everyone else attacking him, you're conflating his explanation with his personal character. That's not fair.

Tell that to Eduardo Saverin and the Winklevoss twins.

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