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duxup

Reminds me of the story of Gumroad.

Good idea, got VC money, couldn't live up to VC expectations. So it's a failure.

Sold back to founder for $1.

So they run lean and does just fine...

https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-...

I worry there are a lot of 'VCed' ideas that given a lean system and time to grow / adjust could be productive but otherwise are shutdown for not being Facebook.

It would be interesting if there was sort of a VC Failed Exit Market where folks could pickup the crumbs and see what they could do... granted there's a lot of variables in that (first comes to mind is the lost knowledge base of the original team / staff).

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Their virtual board meeting is time spent worth. https://youtu.be/fw4qTeBvzGg

That's pretty cool that their board meetings are public. :)

Not intending to denigrate this in any way because it is cool, but that video wasn't the board meeting (notwithstanding the title), that was the founder/CEO giving a recap of the board meeting.

Since I'm the only one on the board, every meeting is a board meeting :)

Ah, I see. A bit odd to call it a "meeting" then. Board briefing to the shareholders?

Whatever you call it, I doff my hat.

Interesting watch thanks. Makes me think it would be good for transparency if all board meetings of publicly traded companies should also be recorded and available online.

Transparency can be a double-edged sword. For a healthy board in a healthy company this would be fine, for one which is already in difficulty it could make the situation worse as the frank conversation that could previously take place at board meetings would be driven underground.

Take for example a company that's at a critical point. Board needs to decide to a)cut costs by laying off some staff b)seek a buyer c)tough it out as some big clients are close to signing next quarter and will pull it through to profitability.

If the board conversation around this topic was public the big clients will probably pull out as they will doubt the supplier's long-term viability, key staff may leave rather than wait to see if they get cut and any buyer will be looking for a firesale.

So basically all the options (in this example) turn bad if the conversation is public.

Boards would never go for it because it would reveal how little work they actually do.

And how evil they actually are.

Wait, how did the founder manage to get it for $1? I didn't think that was a thing that could happen?

It didn't completely happen. Only some of the investors sold their shares back for $1. But in general, quite a few investors seem to be willing to get rid of their shares (cheaply), once it turns out that the business won't scale, and the founders want to continue running it as a lifestyle business.

From the article:

> I am following up our conversation a few months ago. KP would like to sell our ownership back to Gumroad for $1. Can we discuss this week?

> Mike had left KPCB to start a new company, and KPCB didn’t want the operational headache of appointing a new board member. Plus, it helped their taxes.

> One investor joined them. We’ve bought back a couple more, since then. I keep the rest of the investors up-to-date with a brief email every few months.

VC's don't mind losing money if they can control when they lose it. They can use losses (selling shares back for $1) during the same year that they have big gains (maybe they won big on Uber that year) and they can offset capital gains taxes which will sometimes justify a loss they took on another investment.

In the case of the Gumroad guy, this is exactly what he did/ He basically let VCs choose when they took their losses once they realized Gumroad wasn't going to be the next Facebook. They used the losses to offset some huge wins they got on other investments. The VC walks away happy because he exchanged otherwise useless stock to increase his returns on something else he sold that he did really good on. The owner of Gumroad walks away happy because he gets his company back. Win-win for everyone.

So they are treating companies like lottery tickets with some residual value (offsetting taxes)?

Yes - that's the business VCs are in.

In order to claim a capital loss on your taxes, you have to sell. No point in holding something that's going nowhere.

Mind, for a VC. A VC needs at least 100x on their investment. You don't realistically get that unless you invest very very early or you exit to a strategic acquirer, and most acquisitions aren't by strategic acquirers.

That stake was likely worth hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars, but to KPCB it wasn't worth the hassle to find someone willing to pay that. They know they make a loss on most of their investments.

There's a small cottage industry of purchasers who will buy heavily depressed for chump change. It can be strategic to help offset other gains in a tax year.

The purchaser collects a service fee and a lottery ticket for the random "XYZ Inc sold patent to IBM for $10 million during company liquidation."

Can you explain more please? I dont understand. If I buy a thing that was once worth 100 million dollars for 10 million dollars, I havent lost anything yet because it would need to go down even further from 10, right?

The seller's main utility in selling is to realize the losses for tax purposes.

The buyer isn't buying for tax offsets. They're buying at deep discounts because they're often the only bidder and the hope that they occasionally find themselves taking on some asset for which the sellers have vastly underestimated the value (such as some obscure patent).

It's not unusual at all for businesses in the same situation. (A good business at a small scale, not profitable to scale larger)

Delicious was bought back from Yahoo, in fact that happened a few times with companies that Yahoo bought and spun off again.

I tried to read Gunroad’s Medium post and couldn’t because of Medium’s paywall.

Now THAT is irony.

This is a browser addon that bypass paywalls on several sites, including medium.

For Firefox: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox

For Chrome: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

Most people probably know this anyway, but, try incognito mode.

I doubt whoever wrote that wanted it behind a Medium paywall, but it is :(

https://outline.com/NTwVBw

Oh man that sucks, it's a good story.

Paywall? For me it loads just fine in both Google Chrome and lynx.

My experience with Medium is the paywall is sort of random.

There's two things:

- Medium pops up a "please log in" if you've visited multiple articles in a month, but that's not a paywall, that's just an annoyance. You can dismiss it.

- For a few specific publications, the authors can choose to paywall their content after a few views. OneZero, which is published by Medium themselves, does it. This is from Marker, which also appears to be published by Medium themselves.

Yes, it's confusing for a blog platform to also run publications that accept contributions from outside writers and host those publications on their own blog platform, and have that be different from outside writers just setting up a blog. (I suppose the difference is their own publications have an editor, hopefully they pay contributors, etc.)

You can set your browser to delete your Medium cookies on exit and that usually solves the problem.

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