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Comment by btmorex | Hacker News Reader

Wow. He screwed over his cofounder(s).

As easy as that is to say, this isn't a get-bought-and-get-paid company; it's a shake-up-the-world company. I'm sure he and his co-founders discussed that at length and understand it.

And ultimately, if you have a remarkable team with strong financial backing, isn't that the type of company you really want to work for?

how exactly is it going to shake up the world? I see the best case as more of a mild rattling of the world- a more human social networking, which will either softly nudge people in this direction, move other networking players closer to the real-world social model, or be a sort of nice subtle tool in the mobile social web.

In no way is it something that as currently formed has a really big dollar exit potential- i mean, ideally, the product will never become very valuable to advertisers. If they monetize some other way which can scale big, then they're way smarter than I can imagine, but i don't see the data aggregation model or traditional ad model working with this product...it's a very techie-oriented app at this point in time. The benefits are not visible at all to "normals", and there is no business use case like twitter/FB have to accelerate adoption as a platform.

The world has no idea Path exists yet, so there is a while to go before anything is going to be shaken up at least outside of the bay area.

I'm sure he and his co-founders discussed that at length and understand it.

Well, from the article:

The decision to turn Google down was not unanimous, according to sources, and may have become what some people are describing as "extremely contentious."

So what is your speculation about what they discussed or agreed on based on?

If by screwed, you mean owning a very good percentage of a company valued at $25m.

It's possible, maybe even likely, that the founders talked it over with Kleiner and Index and the VCs allowed them to cash out a bit.

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