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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

>They don't have to value the company at $0 to fuck you over once you're gone. The current board can depreciate all of the shares by 50% and then issue themselves twice their original shares so they break even.

Mark Zuckerberg tried a variation of that game to cut out Eduardo Saverin's shares when they changed the company from a Florida LLC to a Delaware Inc. Well, Saverin sued and Facebook lost that lawsuit; they settled. Saverin got ~4% ownership worth $5+ billion at the time.

https://www.businessinsider.com/exclusive-heres-the-email-zu...

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Facebook did not lose any lawsuit. A settlement is a far cry from a loss and judging from the outcome, it looks like Saverin got screwed over.

So basically, the board will try to screw you over; if you're not in a strong enough position to do something about it then you're out of luck, if you are strong enough to do something about it, then you might be able to recoup some of what you're entitled to.

Anyone know how Zuckerberg avoided the same thing happening to him?

Bezos was a 30 year old with a decade of experience in finance, I assume he was quite savvy. But Zuckerberg was a teen.

Shawn Fanning

Pretty sure it was Sean Parker but I could be wrong

One of the Sean's :)

Or Shauns.

(Oh holy fucking mother of Baa[l], only now it struck me that the name of the animatronic series by the Wallace-and-Gromit guys is of course a play on Shorn the sheep!)

They did it to others? They knew ownership and control was paramount and acted accordingly.

As far as I can tell, Zuckerberg's true talent is being thrown into situations he has no life experience to handle and appropriately picking the right people to surround himself with and listen to.

To steal their ideas and screw them over.

that part is normally just silently implied...

Situations like work.

>Zuckerberg's true talent is being thrown into situations he has no life experience to handle and appropriately picking the right people to surround himself with and listen to.

This seems to be falling apart for him right now, as a bunch of those people have recently left FB. But yeah, I generally agree with your main point, he does seem to be very good at this.

He has the controlling stake in the company.

He had more power, because Facebook was an obvious rocket ship. So he could make better deals for himself when it came time to finance, and retain a controlling share in the company. If the board tried to fire him, he could just fire the board.

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