This is perhaps simply a good reminder that everyone has a price and nothing is set in stone. If you’re in a position of leadership, be humble and real. If you’re an employee, don’t be naive. The market has the last word.
But it's OK. It was very naive to say 'never' and it was a bit naive to take it at face value. As long as they paid their employees well and treated them with respect, and were clear of their prospects, I fail to see who is hurt here ? Except customers being now under the Intuit umbrella, that must hurt...
In the end what changed is that e-mail based marketing was on the decline, with other mediums taking over. There's a point where an industry that stops growing fast eventually consolidates and it tends to get absorbed by groups that has other revenue streams.
FWIW this is completely incorrect. Over the past 2 years other marketing channels have skyrocketed in cost (eg FB ads) and most brands/companies are now investing heavily into email marketing. It's a significant growth industry right now, more so than at any time since I've been involved with email marketing (since ~2010).
At first I thought it was just phishers trying something new, but when I looked where the mails lead it turned out to be those actual brands.
Yeah, the market valuation went from 10x revenue for a early stage company to 30x revenue for a mature company.
Great for us, as we got almost all of their customers.
I recently heard the story of how that happened. The original founders had no intention of selling out, and had signed a deal with the others that unless they were offered a well-defined but ridiculously high price, that the original founders could buy back the shares to take back control.
Well, the multinational company offered the ridiculously high price, and the original founders had no chance to make a higher offer. So they lost "their baby", which is now just a pale shadow of what it once was.
The founders got a lot of money of course, so not a sob story.
It must be disheartening though, to see something you created get run into the ground.
Bust out the idea bin and make something else!
Also to clarify on the seeming heartless I sort of see things as being diluted when others work on them -- in a good way! -- for each person that adds to your thing it goes from mine to our. Long enough and big enough and it's more other people's creativity than yours. Your baby is all grown up and ready to do it's own thing
Our finance-based culture is very destructive to good companies. Whenever a founder sells a company and leaves, the company almost always goes steeply downhill.
> and had signed a deal with the others that unless they were offered a well-defined but ridiculously high price, that the original founders could buy back the shares to take back control.
Yeah some might figure it out, but for me NH isn't Facebook and I'd like to keep it that way.
It seems like there is a pattern of companies buying other companies and that essentially helps the competitors.
I don't know, having billions looks like a liability to me.
There's a point where it might make sense for him... even if not for bare personal/lifestyle reasons, a billion could be useful to fund plenty new or existing opensource projects in line with his principles.
'Offering' other people a life well lived as if that should be my task and not theirs, and justifying things you otherwise wouldn't do has very big problems. Because you can always take it one step further, it never ends really.
Basically, anyone who's got kids is trying (struggling?) to impart this very life lesson: it's easiest to just get your kids what they want, but that's not the best way to raise them.
You can't teach a man to fish if he's dead from starvation.
You'd never have to worry that a significant unplanned expense would ruin your life. You come down with a major medical condition and end up with years of major medical expenses? Some drunk driver T-bones you and totals your car? Lose your job and spend a year or two unemployed? House burns down and you still owe the majority of your mortgage? None of those will ever be a concern again if you hold that $100M job for even a year.
Medical expenses -> health insurance
Some drunk driver T-bones you and totals your car -> liability insurance is compulsory
Lose your job and spend a year or two unemployed -> unemployment insurance is compulsory, you get 60 percent of what you made for one year
House burns down and you still owe the majority of your mortgage -> uhg, got us here, we can't afford houses but there is private insurance for that
So even though I pay hefty taxes (or because I do), I still end up much richer than a developer in the US. In theory I don't even need to save up money for retirement, as the general pension fund has me covered (though with the current demographic development I don't fully trust that).
So I probably don't have a good reason to give up my morality of more money. Have been never tempted though.
(for what it's worth, I currently work for a company that makes software offering various kinds of secondary insurance, and I've spent the last few months learning about the kinds of things "cancer insurance" and "accident insurance" are for, and it's been an eye-opener)
And as for your car: yeah, liability insurance is compulsory in the US, but it's really painful to be hit by someone who's illegally uninsured. It actually happened to my mom a few years ago—she got lucky, her insurance was willing to pick up the tab, but she could've been on the hook for a lot of money if her insurance punted instead (to be fair, the damage to her car was entirely cosmetic, and her car was still operable, just with a car-sized dent in it).
In Europe this is covered and very rare currently. After the first four years the car need to pass an official exam each six or twelve months. No insurance means that you can't even start the test nor move the car from there except in a tow truck (paid for you). Driving with the test outdated means a fine and after some months your car can be deregistered automatically. It does not worth the trouble.
I hold no ill will towards undocumented immigrants, but there's not much you can do if someone hits you in an illegal vehicle.
Maybe you wouldn’t be willing to sacrifice humans to Kali, but you might still be okay with working in an open-plan office for two years.
Definitely not. But just to be sure, you should still make me an offer.
Mathematically, yes. Practically, so what? 10M is a number that could provide all I could reasonably want for the rest of my life. 10B puts a target on my back, and for what? What does 10B buy me that 10M wouldn't? A life of isolation and extravagance? I can't say that I would turn down the chance to find out, but I'm FI already, and maybe it's lack of imagination but I already have trouble spending my modest discretionary budget as it is.
A private jet.
Influence on the global stage
The ability to finance meaningful changes to the world - be they things like disease eradication, political movements, space endeavors. Rather than needing to band together with like-minded individuals and bring a voice to the table, you can outright create or buy a group to enable your vision (within the constraints of physics, and the political overton window)
Somethings that could interest you:
A private island?
A megayacht?
A mansion/penthouse in a ritzy part of LA/NYC (Bezos's LA mansion alone was 1XX MM)?
A professional sports team?
A private jet?
The ability to call the leader of your country and either get through or get a meeting on the books?
Notice that what's interesting about a lot of those isn't just the initial cost, but many of them have quite high carrying costs.
But those are just interesting generalities. At that wealth you can (really have to) get creative. Paul Allen bought a bunch of rock star's guitars and a bunch of Sci Fi memorabilia, and then built a museum to hold them.
Where is that? Are you planning on living in the country? In most large cities, it doesn't seem like 10MM will be enough for you to live in an estate and still not have to work for ongoing regular expenses (food, etc.)
And it's fine you don't want any of those things. Better than fine, that's great. But there are a lot of things that you need more than 10MM for.
Heck I'd probably fund a couple tenure positions at a university on the condition that they research certain problems and publish everything to an open access journal. What does a bio lab cost to run, would 10 million a year cover it? That'd be 100 years of funding for 10% of my wealth.
I'd probably follow it up by going to one of my cities troubled youth schools and offering full ride scholarships to everyone who graduates. Figure 100 students a year, 100k scholarship, that's another 10 million a year, so another 10% gone.
Tl;Dr I'm having no problems figuring out how to spend 10 billion!
You could start a company that builds rockets to go explore Mars.
In other words, you could do something great.
At 10M, you have, as you say, a modest discretionary budget. Which is to say, it's modest, and not extravagant. The things you can do frivolously while spending $300k/year is different than what you can do while spending $1mm/year, but as you've discovered, unless you get disgustingly ostentatious (I hear the poors only own one car, and drive the same car for longer than a month.), taking care of your creature comforts in a reasonable way isn't that expensive. Eating $400 steak dinner every night for a year is only $150k/yr ("only"). So, other than get ostentatious (what, you don't have multiple houses in multiple states?), what do you do? Change the world.
I mean, congratulations on having joined the two comma club, your little discretionary budget is cute. At 10B, your discretionary budget is probably not actually 1000 times larger, because that's a different game of liquidity, but what you can do without remotely threatening your principal investments is way larger. At 10M, if there was a reason you had to spend $5mm, you'd have to consider it very strongly before doing it. At 10B, you can get $1mm in cash from the bank and light it on fire for the hell of it because you had nothing better to do on a Tuesday night. If there's a movie you want made, you get to ask whomever you want to star in it. You want to have a movie made about your life, starring Nick Cage as you? He's having money problems, so he'll probably say yes.
10B puts you right above Steven Rales, wikipedia article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_M._Rales. Which is to say, if you want to be a recluse, be a recluse, but 10b puts you in the club of people who have wikipedia articles written about them, despite not being a household name or noteable. Edward Snowden has a wikipedia article, and he's not a billionaire, but he was forced to do some world changey shit to get that. You'd get that simply for having that kind of money. Poke around the Forbes billionaire list - https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/. See how many names you recognize as household names. 10b automatically dumps you in those leagues. Marc Benioff's #240 with an estimated $10b. Now, you may not want to be, but if you're familiar with his work, you can do anything like that, on that level. Own a local sports team. It's a bit different rooting for the local sports team when it's your sports team.
Personally, I'd fund science and research and the arts rather than have anything to do with sports. Affordable healthcare. Buy buildings and give buildings to Planned Parenthood so they don't have to keep moving around (something about protestors makes their neighbors nervous). Fix homelessness (which is a big problem, but I'm sure $10m/yr would help lots of aspects of it). Start a chain of coffee shops and over-employ people so that the people that work there have regular weekly schedules and can go to college.
I hate to say it, but that's really a lack of imagination. Instead of $10M principle with a modest discretionary budget, think of the unreasonable shit you could do with $10m every year. Some of it could even be good for other people.
I think that's a bias of hindsight, something people say after seeing it happen in a particular situation. In other situations, principles, promises, and other factors have the last word.
Your second point however, “don’t be naive” agree 100%
Oh wait you’re serious. Let me laugh even harder.
Breaking the law for a company is simple a cost of doing business. If that costs too ouch then the lobbying/bribe budget increases to cancel it out m, but most of the time it’s just a line of risk on the balance sheet.
I think a lot of people also have an optimal level of law breakage.
But the big thing that separates your everyday person and companies is that corporations will gladly and willfully break the law, even in cases where they weigh the risk (perhaps they have a legal argument about how it’s not actually breaking the law, but it’s probably paper thin) because it can often be more profitable to commit the crime. and pay whatever fine is imposed than not commit the crime in the first place. It is incredibly rare for anyone to go to jail or be prosecuted individually for corporate crimes, and so the risk to any particular individual is exceedingly low.
I can’t really think of any reasonable example where I could commit a crime as an individual and come out the other side with a net positive, despite being caught/prosecuted.
Corporations aren’t playing with the same deck, and their bad behavior is constantly rewarded. Sure, they can sometimes go over the line and tank the entire operation but that is far and away the exception instead of the rule.
And even in cases where the managed 100% wants fully comply with existing law, there are still tradeoffs. How much do we fund internal enforcement and will that prevent us from being competitive? Which isn't so much about actively trying to break the law, but willing to risk that breakage will happen, or even naive trust of employees.