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Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

LOL:

“And obviously all of us are millennials and none of us have printers,” one former employee said.

I'm pretty sure you can still go to a FedEx office and use a public printer. (That's only if they won't accept an electronically-signed PDF.)

I don't know how SPACs work, but in a traditional IPO, you have a 6-month lockup to keep everyone from cashing out on IPO day. As the end of lockup approaches, the price plummets since the market knows there'll be a lot more shares around.

So do SPACs drop for the same reason -- market anticipating all the employees selling?

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The lockup for employees/former employees was different here. Executives had the 6 month lockup. Former employees who bought options were not supposed to be subject to any lockup. And current employees had no lockup, I believe until the end of the year, and then a lockup would be in place until the first quarter results or something (not sure how how many weeks they have to sell before they can’t ahead of an earnings drop, but I read that in other coverage of this mess).

The issue isn’t about lockup, it’s about share conversion and the fact that the company hired to do it didn’t get anyone the right information — some people didn’t get information at all — and once employees did get the correct information, printer or not, they can’t get in touch with the company, can’t get questions answered, and even if they’ve submitted paperwork, still don’t have the ability to sell their shares five days in.

I agree the printer excuse is dumb. You can find a printer for something worth potentially thousands of dollars. But the core complaints are valid. And this isn’t about lockup. It’s about poorly done share conversions.

To be completely fair, the printer comment seemed to be tongue in cheek. I’m sure if this really were a blocker, they would have easily solved it with a quick trip to FedEx office, as mentioned.

Applying Hanson's razor to this would be sort of strange due to the fact that this involved real money and people didn't understand or had extremely onerous ways to do what they wanted.

There was a big issue with PS3's having the OtherOS functionality being removed which resulted in a class action lawsuit and it was ruled in favor of the owners (who I was one of them). The lawyers made it so difficult to actually retrieve any money from the members to the point that the Judge ruled that the lawyers who represented the people in the class action didn't get any of the money they were promised and I'm fine that it cost Sony and lawyers because I was probably only going to get probably less than $20 and practically it would discourage Sony in the future to remove features from their products.

>6-month lockup to keep everyone from cashing out on IPO day

This is a bit off-topic, but something I've always wondered. What if the lockup period was staggered per-employee across those 6 months? i.e. say you have a 180-day lockup, and 900 employees. On day 1, the 5 longest-tenured employees can sell. On day 2, the next 5, etc, and on day 180, the last 5. This avoids the IPO crash on day 1, and also avoids a crash 6 months later. Would something this be feasible?

This is fantastical. The reason it's not done is because there are well established ways to do it that work other than this.

> also avoids a crash 6 months later

Does this actually happen? And if it does, surely some hedge funds are trying to cash in on this, shorting in the days leading up to it, then covering as insiders sell.

I can tell you from personal experience that yes, it does. Or at least it did, when our IPO happened, around 2000.

I don't know how hedge funds played it. Shorting is always dangerous when you don't know who out there might buy on the dips.

> And obviously all of us are millennials and none of us have printers,” one former employee said.

If only there was a way to buy things online and have them delivered to you. Perhaps they should have asked their coworker

https://www.buzzfeed.com/emilyshwake/target-practical-produc...

I know you're just joking, but the link on that page is broken and the item in question doesn't seem to be for sale anymore anywhere. Plus, it would have taken at least a few days to ship from Target.

I don't think the printer comment was meant to be taken as a serious excuse, but rather an offhanded frustrated comment.

> I don't think the printer comment was meant to be taken as a serious excuse

Never say anything to a reporter that you don't want them to print (or if you do, first make them agree that it's off the record).

> I'm pretty sure you can still go to a FedEx office and use a public printer.

Or go out and buy one. $100 is 0.1% of your $100k (or more) payday. And overnight the signed docs. This isn't something you want to cheap-out on.

the printer excuse is pretty dumb indeed. Unless it's a 400-page email or the net value you'll get from the stock is so low that it's not even worth the printing fee (which is $.5 per page(?) in FedEx).

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