The Forgotten Founder: A Silicon Valley Tale of Humiliation and Revenge
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Obviously if you're running out of runway, you take whatever terms you can get, since your company is worthless if it goes bankrupt; but if your company is profitable and your only concern is about allowing it to grow faster, why the heck would you take a deal which is practically begging your investors to fire you?
[1] We're not told how much Cambrian Ventures took, but for $250k it presumably wasn't a huge amount. I'm going to arbitrarily guess 25%.
[2] Based on the way the numbers work out, I'm guessing they kept 20% of their stock outright and gave back the remaining 80% to be four-year vested. This fits with the fact that the company was about a year old when they took the funding.
That said, I've seen people raise (smaller amounts) of money without any vesting provisions at all (i.e. the founders owned their shares outright). That, to my way of thinking, makes the investor the idiot.
EDIT: I don't mean to imply that resets are a given. Only that they make sense in certain situations, both for founders and investors. There is no "standard", but there are "ways things are often done" for a reason.
At incorporation, sure -- because at that point the entire value of the company is the work the founders will be doing in the future. But in the case of yousendit, they implemented vesting at a point where the company already had a significant value; the fact that it was able to survive having two of its three founders fired indicates that their contribution was made before the Series A, not after.
It doesn't make you an idiot to take that deal. It makes you a part of the VC machine. It's just how it works.
I'd say that anyone who accepts "that's just the way it works" as an answer is an idiot, but maybe that's just my cynicism showing. :-)
Once again I'm surprised at how very very few founders have a thorough knowledge of what they're signing up for and how to get what they want. It's your company. Act like it. You don't need permission and nothing is "standard". Also think hard before you get into bed with A level VC's and angels and make sure you are on your A game because the worlds most skilled investors come with a heavy premium.
If you're bringing real value, there's nothing wrong with saying no.
It's really a noop on their part. They know full well that if a founder ever leaves the company they can recover the ownership by diluting the bejesus out of him after he's gone (and bonus: everyone else who has already left is also diluted to near-zero).
Vesting just saves them the energy they'd have to exert on the backend.
This depends a bit on the maturity of the company. For example, at the seed stage, where the founders may only have known each other for 3 months of their lives, very credible people are going to tell you that they can name dozens of reasons why you should have vesting. If money first comes into the company around month 5 and you have a seed round closed around month 8, there's quite a window where acrimonious breakups can happen.
In the event of an acrimonious breakup, fast forward four years. In the event you manage to pull the company back from the brink, do you want someone from two lifetimes ago in startup years a) owning ~1/4 of your company and b) looking like Huge Unknown Risk Factor every time you raise a new round or make similarly consequential decisions?
That's why smart people who have seen bad breakups before are going to suggest vesting and it won't really be a suggestion.
Now, on the flipside, if I hypothetically brought on my best friend to work on AR and took investing at the two year mark, any conversation beginning with "You should really give all your shares back" would be pretty darn brief.
That's a terrible way to allocate equity.
Resetting the vesting clock to zero at funding sounds insane, but if you need the money, the people offering it do set the terms. I know a lot of people who've gotten institutional VC rounds for companies; I believe all of them vested. You're right that it probably can't hurt to push back.
The other half of my point is that in some transactions, "should" and "fair" don't matter. Either the terms make sense for them, or they don't. Terms that make sense aren't fair? Can't reasonably accept them? Ok. No deal.
VCs are professional deal makers. They can't code, they can't round HTML corners, they can't even write copy. Their one skillset is optimizing the problem of allocating other people's money in small companies for optimal return.
Parent commenter is right in that you should push back and negotiate as hard as you can. If you're a better bet than any of the 10 other prospects they're prepared to fund instead of you, you might win. Otherwise, nope. But there's no sense getting angry about it; nobody can reasonably say that a venture capitalist is obligated to fund anyone, on any terms. The sole moral obligation of a VC is to obtain the maximum return for their limited partners. Some of them bend over backwards to try to make things better for company "operators"; in a very reasonable way of looking at things, the VCs who do that may be the ones who are acting unethically.
I'll give you "fair", but I think "should" has a very real meaning: If for every deal X which does not have property P there is a deal X' which does have property P such that for every participant utility(X') >= utility(X), then the participants should negotiate a deal with which has property P. To take an example I ran into recently: You should never simultaneously buy a life annuity and life insurance (on average they cancel each other; but you have to pay two risk premiums).
This may sound trivial, but it's useful for recognizing dishonest actors: If someone wants a deal which doesn't have the properties you think it should have, their utility function isn't what you think it is. In the above example, if your financial advisor is trying to convince you to buy both a life annuity and life insurance, it tells you that they're thinking about the commissions they can earn, not about optimizing your finances.
Some [VCs] bend over backwards to try to make things better for company "operators"; in a very reasonable way of looking at things, the VCs who do that may be the ones who are acting unethically.
I agree: They're sacrificing the current fund's returns (by making deals which are suboptimal for them) in order to improve their reputation (a personal benefit) and allow themselves to get better deals in the future (thereby improving future funds' returns).
An angel can spend his money to be your friend. A VC shouldn't spend his clients' money to be your friend.
The idea of a lifestyle company is totally unattractive to venture capitalists to the point where you'd think that only total losers would aspire to create a stable company. If it's not a rocketship to the moon, then investors don't want to touch it. But a lifestyle company founder can get equally rich - just not one huge pile of money at one time. They can be paid handsomely though and create a great company that provides a great life for a lot of people instead of burning out and creating a miserable life for everybody except the founder.
They won't be as obscenely rich but several million is definitely nothing strange (Euros or Dollars, pick your poison).
VC's won't touch such businesses (and they shouldn't) because the return rate is not worth the hassle for them but that is just a matter of perspective.
For founders the life style businesses are typically a safer bet and a life that is more conducive to having a family and a more or less normal life besides the business.
For a VC babysitting a small but profitable company is just as much work as one that might hit out of the park. And the chance of a return multiplied by the return itself is way larger than it is for a life-style business.
The risk profile of a VC is much different than the risk profile of most business people and they only come out ahead because they make multiple bets, which is something most business people can not do.
According to Dow Jones Venturesource, there were only 522 M&As, buyouts, or IPOs in 2011 among venture-backed companies. 522. By contrast, over 300 people are injured by lightning strikes per year, in the US.
While I appreciate your point, this is a very flawed analogy. There are only a few thousand people in a position to shoot for an M&A each year, and a few hundred million people in a position to get hit by lightning. Relative to the number of adults in the U.S., very few people start companies that could potentially be scalable each year, and out of the ones that do, very few scratch the surface of basic competence. So if you do start one, and you're reasonably competent, your odds are actually pretty good.
I also disagree with the assertion that a lifestyle business is easier than a moonshot. In my experience, both take a roughly similar toll on your life, but a lifestyle business doesn't have the upside to make the whole thing worth it. In a software development industry, a family where both partners are professional can bring in > $250k in salary each year working regular full time jobs, which is a very cushy lifestyle. I see no sense in working 16 hour days for a shot at the same salary. If you work that much, might as well make it a moonshot.
Let's be clear: It is vanishingly unlikely.
In addition:
"In my experience, both take a roughly similar toll on your life, but a lifestyle business doesn't have the upside to make the whole thing worth it. In a software development industry, a family where both partners are professional can bring in > $250k in salary each year working regular full time jobs, which is a very cushy lifestyle. I see no sense in working 16 hour days for a shot at the same salary."
For a talk I gave at Lessconf a few days ago, I broke down the numbers. Assuming 25% ownership in a startup which reached an $8 million dollar sale (which is much higher than most, as I'm sure you know), that results in less than $2 million post-tax.
I ran the numbers in the talk to demonstrate how much my business, Freckle Time Tracking, a most boring SaaS, would make in the same time period and beyond the 5 & 1/2 years of leisure post-3-year-lock-in. (Assuming a not immoderate spend of $10k/mo and savings of $5k/mo -- remember, if you get lock-in -- and most do -- you will have to work out of the Valley, where everything is expensive.)
My time tracking product alone will bring in significantly more than the buyout after 6 years, nearly triple what an $8 million dollar buyout would over a period of 9 years. And what's more, it keeps earning.
That's just one of the little "lifestyle" businesses my husband & I have going. We don't work 16-hour days. We don't even work 40-hour weeks. We did for about a year, year and a half, but we also took weeks and weeks off in the same time period.
Time tracking, let me repeat. Boring, "saturated," blah blah blah. Time tracking alone will make me us millionaires by the time I'm 30 -- on the side, and better yet, with 100% ownership. :)
And, as I said, we've got other things going as well.
Making an actual business with actual profit is different than what everyone calls a "startup" these days. You don't have to work your ass off. You just have to serve a market which needs serving, and provide more value than you're charging. These are different skill sets than hunting down VC and viral growth. More useful, in the end, and with a higher rate of return for the many instead of a few.
And yet it shouldn't be, because profit-driven tech businesses can still be scalable and have many of the advantages of true "startups". It's still much closer to a "startup" than it is to a brick and mortar operation.
On the flip side, people seeking viral growth probably should not be killing themselves with work either. If you love what you do and you are productive then maybe 60 hours a week is okay, but certainly it's not serving VC interest or anyone else if you're burning out. Personally I think if there were a guaranteed way to use the other 138 hours in a week as personal R&R that would result in an uninterrupted, in-the-zone, 30-hour work week, that would be a good deal for any employer of creatives.
When I write about "startups" (with quotes), I am writing a reflection of what most people (at least people who write, talk, and comment) believe. :) Not what I believe ought to be.
You are citing Dow Jones Venturesource exits. First off, they are tracking venture-backed companies. So your denominator in that particular fraction isn't people shooting for M&A someday-- it's a tiny slice of companies that get VC dollars. How many TOTAL VC backed companies exist? 5k? 50k? I honestly have no idea, but comparing it to people getting struck by lightning is just silly.
Second, you mention an 8 million dollar sale as your example. $71M was the median in those 522 exits (http://www.dowjones.com/pressroom/releases/2011/01032012-VCE...).
All that aside, I think this whole argument just shouldn't be happening. I think we're all in agreement that the funded path is higher risk and higher reward.
As for whether my number comparisons make good dialectic sense or not, it doesn't matter. This isn't dialectic, it's rhetoric. It's a tool for thinking about something. There's no point in pretending we're even attempting to approach Absolute Truth here.
As a tool for thinking about something, a contrast of M&As vs lightning strike injuries is quite valuable. Because we all "know" people who have been bought, but very few of us know people who have been injured by lightning. This shows us that we're in a bubble, a slice of unreality, where the availability heuristic skews our deeply felt understanding of likelihood.
Finally, yes. Dow Jones Venturesource tracks only venture-backed companies. Everyone on HN seems to agree that achieving venture funding is not only important for growth, but important for the connections the VC has to people who would buy the startup. Presumably that belief has some grounding in fact. This leads us to the conclusion that an acquisition is more likely when there is VC involved than not.
To me lifestyle business is more about declaring that your values are in conflict with what you feel would need to be done for further growth for this company, at this time; not because it couldn't be done, and even if it couldn't you really wouldn't know until after you tried.
This.
To support your statement, it's worth looking into how many of the large companies today started out large -- and how many started out small and incrementally built up. The majority of successful large businesses started small.
That isn't to say they didn't take loans or types of investment to grow faster, once they already had a steady revenue base underneath them. But few succeeding in the jump from zero to 1000 headcount with Other People's Money.
Around the first dotcom boom, one of the characteristics of the destined-to-fail companies was that they tried to copy big businesses "are" like instead of emulating what those big businesses were like when they were small and starting out. Fancy offices, game rooms, huge perks, lots of headcount was a chief indicator of future doom.
A friend of mine played Fucked Company Bingo and used to bet on which companies would fail spectacularly based solely on whether or not they had press/web site touting their foosball table. She did extraordinarily well in the office pool, I've heard.
IMO, it's all happening again.
The poet Basho once wrote, "Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought." For startups, perhaps we should amend that to "Do not seek to copy what your target business is doing now. Seek what they sought when they began."
Not being combative, but can you justify that statement with data? It just seems implausible to me, given that the moonshot companies tend to employ a lot more people. Yes, relatively few companies become "big deals", but those companies (Adobe, MS, Google, Facebook, Apple) are the ones that actually employ most of the people in the industry.
Aside from 37Signals, what lifestyle businesses are (a) less stressful and (b) more lucrative than a shoot-for-the-moon startup? If it's a technology business, it's something that will be obsolesced rapidly unless you keep moving (e.g Yousendit being obsolesced by Dropbox), so where's the "lifestyle" in that?
It seems that your best options are either (a) join a startup or (b) work for a large company. The no man's land in between seems to be the highest stress and worst returns, with no prospect of your ship ever really coming in.
Most of these people are too busy making bank to blog about it (or they simply don't care to be recognized as business experts).
Why do you equate headcount with riches? As one of the richest people to ever write a business book, Felix Dennis says "Overhead walks on two legs." It was an important enough statement for him to include it at least 3 times in one little book. That should tell us something.
Employing people isn't a correlation to riches. Employees cost a lot of money.
As for "tech businesses"… Harvest has been virtually the same for years and years. So has my "competitor" to Harvest, Freckle. It doesn't matter. Your model of "tech biz obsolescence" is dependent on a winner-take-all scenario. Real business -- what you call "lifestyle business" -- doesn't operate that way.
True. Especially when you consider that investment isn't income. When an investor gives you one huge pile of money at one time, it's not for you, it's for the business.
It's this sort of wasteful spending that kind of makes me want them to fail.
Seriously, I don't know how they could get away with that. Surely it's some kind of financial malfeasance?
In business and life in general you will sometimes make big mistakes and/or just plain get screwed over. This is going to hit most people's sense of self worth and ability to reason like a ton of bricks. You need to be able to recognize when you've been compromised so you don't end up digging a deeper hole like this fellow did.
Sometimes you just have to move on. Revenge isn't going to get you anywhere.
But when you happily engage in vengeful DDOS attacks, shitty app spam, and flip apparently stolen websites, it paints a pretty clear picture of your character. I know I sure wouldn't want a guy like Shaikh working for me. Not in a million years.
No, the reason why I feel sympathy for this guy is that he was so socially inept that he couldn't figure out how to talk with other people, build business relationships, build team relationships, and manage others without being a two-faced jerk (don't take it personally, Mahler, I want to prove to Koon that I care only about success and will sacrifice anyone for it?). The guy was just too out of his element for the battles he needed to face.
He may have been technically very good, despite being socially awkward, and some jerks may have taken advantage of that. But that in no way justifies or accommodates the bad decisions he made. He's essentially taking the stance that two wrongs make a right, and so I think he has a really poor sense of right and wrong.
After all, there are many socially inept people who manage to live happily as they are; there are many more people who made mistake and learned from them.
"The man of pity, must have his share of blame"
Porsches and houses worth well over a million $US within 6 months of picking up $250K funding in a year when revenues were projected to hit 1M makes absolutely no sense.
They should have simply matched growth to income and ridden the growth-curve instead of diluting and splurging on luxury goods.
Lots of bad decisions here, including vesting for founders, a culture of blame and so on.
Even now I hear of people buying homes way out of their means because they have some stock in the currently hot company of the week that has some assumed paper value.
Investors recognize there's a problem there, so there's a trend these days to find ways for startup employees to cash out a bit.
That, however, applies mainly to later rounds. The YouSendIt guys made classic rookie mistakes. They mistook startups for a get-rich-quick scheme, but they aren't; median time to exit for a startup is 7 years from funding. And that's if you're lucky enough to exit at all.
A really nice read. Worth every word. I wish everything were written like this. Straight and to the point. Constantly progressing, no BS, no filler. The writing was transparent and didn't get in the way.
That pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the management and board. The clowns probably included a one-way non-disparagement clause as well, which is quite humorous in light of this article.
BTW: Standard etiquette in the valley is for the employees to contact anyone who has just left the company, usually in email from the company, so there is a written record of who initiated contact.
The CEO was an asshole and was having the company pay for his candy red porsche as well as taking a hefty portion of the sales commissions whilst laying people off due to lack of funds.
I hated that company. Never sign one of these agreements.
2) This seems to be the inevitable consequence of third-tier investors, weird family politics, and founders with less than fully developed ethical sense (which is fine; I would expect young founders and first time founders especially to learn somewhat what things are considered ethical, starting from a personal moral framework -- that's what advisors, lawyers, investors, etc. are for).
3) The Mahler character's first instinct (this will end in tears and disaster) perhaps was right; gut instinct is a good check on decisions like that. Necessary but not sufficient.
4) Wow, now I remember what it was like when people still built stuff on windows. Using linux (or bsd) was a huge competitive advantage 1998-2005 or so; I guess like having the Internet was in the early 1990s. Macs for desktop/laptop use became this in the mid-2000s; what is the current unfair advantage held by anyone competent? Maybe the cloud, and devops vs. individual system sysadmin? Single-command deployment?
Your guesses for the future don't quite fit that description except maybe the cloud stuff, but that's actually gotten pretty mainstream. It might have been a good example from 5 years or so ago.
Thinking about it some the best thing I can come up with is interpreted/dynamically typed programming languages. It pains me to say this though because I kind of believe in my core that compiled/strongly typed languages are the way to go for large projects. But maybe that's just me holding on to the past? I'm not sure.
Really really good question.
I hate to say it given how much time we waste here, but it's probably reading Hacker News. People here know about node.js, about client-side MVC frameworks, about MongoDB/NoSQL, and the like. Some of those things we even think of as old hat, from way back in 2010 or 2011. Some of them we think of as trendy and without staying power.
But we actually did take the time to look at these technologies, evaluate them, and reject them -- or sometimes, accept them.
Now think about the guys who still think Java is the standard, who might just now be getting around to learning Ruby...all when Ruby is itself fast becoming Blub and the new hotness is actually node + coffeescript (or a more FP language like Haskell/Clojure/Scala).
That's exactly the equivalent of the guys who ran Windows because they just didn't know any better. For better or for worse, competent hackers read Hacker News.
These days it happens more and more often that I will not read an article if I can't get it into Instapaper.
But yes, the next page buttons should be bigger for touchscreen users.
Fundamental to them all is the idea that being "funded" equals "arrival." It doesn't. Revenue and customers equals arrival. Ideally it would be best not to be "funded" at all, since OPM == debt.
It says that the company couldn't figure out how to grow without bringing in a bunch of financiers, who have a low hit rate (3 go north, 3 go south, 4 turn into the living dead), who provided negative 10 yr returns even with Google in the portfolio, and who take 2-3% + 20% of exit from their own investors.
Definitely an excuse to drink, but not for reasons of celebration.
Shaikh has obviously made some big mistakes but take a minute to feel for the guy. He literally bled for the company to save some money so I can imagine the emotional rollercoaster he must have been on.
Well written piece Inc.
Ethics seems to be more of a problem for him than the social awkwardness.
"Eventually, after months of negotiation, Shaikh says, he got a $50,000 severance payment. He agreed to sell his 317,000 shares in the company for $73,000, less than a fourth of what they had been worth in the Series A round."
Does this mean the company was uncertain about whether he was really stealing? I don't think it is normal to pay someone a severance payment when they've been fired for good cause. I think one would have to conclude that the company was unsure of how much it could make stick, and therefore paid some small amount simply to make him go away. Or possibly the severance was in exchange for his agreement to sell his shares at a discount? That would make more sense to me.
The FBI was not involved over this incident. Instead the FBI was involved over this:
"So, on a chilly Tuesday morning in December, Shaikh ran a piece of testing software, called ApacheBench, that flooded YouSendIt's servers with traffic. The servers keeled over immediately. Later that day, a sentence appeared on YouSendIt's Wikipedia page: "Looks like the company may be out of business, their site is down." (Shaikh says he didn't write it.)"
The FBI took this very seriously, and got a friend of Shaikh's to wear a wire and get him talking.
I appreciate that the FBI needs to look into any incident where there has been hacking, but it strikes me this cooperation between the FBI and the various corporations is open to abuse.
I once had a bad breakup with a company, and the ending was frightening to me. This was in 2009.
There was a fellow acting as impresario for a startup. He called himself the CEO, though he also ran a small investment firm, and he had multiple investments that he had to keep an eye on.
The goal of the startup was to build something like Quora, but find a way to get people pay for information (they would pay to ask questions).
The CEO lined up 4 investors who put in a total of $100,000 to get the operation going. 4 programmers were hired, including me. 3 of the programmers were remote, and I was in the New York, where the CEO and project manager were. The other 3 programmers were in the USA and Europe.
We worked hard during the spring and early summer of 2009 to get to the point where we could launch.
Half way through the summer, the decision was made to hire an Indian firm to do the development. They were much cheaper. I would be the technical point of contact. We relied less on the programmers in the USA and Europe and more on the team in India. However, we had very serious problems with the quality of the code coming from India. Almost every time something got checked into Subversion, something broke. I raised my concerns to the project manager, and I cc'ed the project manager on several emails to the team in India, where I tried to educate them on the mistakes they were making. I was inclined to get rid of the team in India, although the CEO and the project manager liked how cheap they were. I suggested we find a different company in India. We all knew that firms in India were of uneven quality -- some good and some bad. If you want to hire a team in India, one often has to do a lot of digging to find a good team.
I tried selling the project manager on implementing unit tests and functional tests, and he suggested that we wait till the site was launched. There was an attitude that we could clean things up once we launched.
There was some funny business with the money that I never fully understood. I was working as a contractor. I was billing at the end of each month, and the company had 30 days to pay, so it was a 60 day cycle from start to finish (from the 1st of one month to the end of the next month).
They only paid me for June at the very end of July, which made me wonder about their money. However, the project manager and his wife invited me to their house upstate, and we spent a week working together, and the project manager assured that there was enough money to pay me. They cooked some wonderful meals and it was a pleasant week and we got a lot of work done. At that moment, I thought of the project manager as a friend, and our work relationship seemed very positive. I was single at the time, and his wife said she had a friend that she wanted to set me up on a date with.
Still, I was suspicious about the money, so half way through August I stopped putting in billable hours. I trusted the project manager, but I did not trust the CEO.
As of September 1st and they had not yet paid me for the work I did during July. This was in violation of the work agreements that we had signed.
I demanded to know whether they had the money to pay me. I wrote to the other contractors and asked if they'd been paid. None of them had. Most of them were only owed small amounts. At this point, the company owed me $10,000. I had been the main programmer for most of the summer.
September gave way to October. For awhile they made vague declarations about paying me part of the money. I began to suspect that they had no intention of paying. I found out that they were still using the team in India, and apparently the team in India was being paid.
In November I had my lawyer send them a letter, urging them to send me the money. I notified the other contracts in Europe and the USA of what I was doing.
After that, everything changed. They had their lawyer write up a counter letter that basically said that all of the bugs on the site were my fault. There was a suggestion that I had maliciously tried to undermine the site, and that I had interfered with the team in India and damaged their ability to move the site forward. The CEO was apparently especially angry about the fact that I'd contacted the other contractors in the USA and Europe, and their lawyer's letter referred to this as tortious interference with their contractors.
The purpose of that counter letter was to frighten me, and to some extent it worked. I realized that if I wanted to get my money, it would involve an ugly fight, with a lot of ugly accusations. I gave up the fight.
I never got paid.
After reading this article at Inc, I have to wonder how far the company could have gone, if they had wanted to take a very aggressive approach with me. On the personal level, I could wonder: If they had made accusations to the FBI, would the FBI have investigated me? What would that entail, and would I have the prove the bugs in the code were not my fault? But aside from the personal level, there is the general issue: companies with aggressive lawyers could potentially use these aggressive tactics to get out of paying contractors. I wish that I could have faith that the folks at the FBI are smart enough to avoid being suckered by these companies, but I don't really have such faith.
Excuse my ignorance, but there was no union involved far as I can tell. What does this comment mean?
Here's Colorado's, the states are all similar:
Why did ugly accusations frighten you away from the fight? It might be what they were counting on, in fact.
To anybody reading this in the same or a comparable position: if your employer owes you back wages walk while you can, the writing is already on the wall and you will likely not get a cent out of them without a protracted fight.
Salaries are paid on time unless there is malice, a bad financial position or both.
Regardless of which it is your first responsibility is to yourself, not to a non-paying company.
I'm sorry if the story is unclear. In the spring, they paid me. They were later and later about paying me as the summer wore on, which caused me to grow suspicious. As I said, I was paid for June at the end of July (the last day of July) which left me feeling somewhat suspicious. I stopped working in mid August. It was about 6 weeks of unpaid work: July and part of August.
As to "far too long" I think a lot of contractors work on a 30 day cycle, billing at the end of the month. I used to use a standard contract that said they had 30 days to pay and then late fees applied. Nowadays I usually insist on being paid within 2 weeks.
"The three co-founders would each be left with less than 3 percent of the company."
Yet they hired an advisor to guide them through the raising stage? Is this normal?
http://www.inc.com/magazine/201203/burt-helm/a-silicon-valle...
My favorite line.
Of course, the real problem is the short attention span of the Internet age but it's hard to fault them for trying to avoid scaring off users.
Half view the pagination version, half view the 1 page version – and see % of the users that actually finish the article.
Memo: when writing an antidisparagement agreement, the first rule of antidisparagement agreements is that you agree not to disclose the existence of the antidisparagement agreement.
IANAL.
I was once laid off from a company that gave me a small (but significant to me) severance check in exchange for signing a non-disparagement agreement. I did jokingly refer to that check as my "hush money", but I had no actual issue with the company or any of my former coworkers. That company did it simply as a matter of course, I imagine to make the laying off process more predictable.
(And I was pretty appreciative of the check itself; between it and my left over vacation days, I made it pretty comfortably to my next position.)