Silicon Valley Tech Investor Orchestrated Takedown Plot of Startup Toptal
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
> Grosz had formed an early-stage venture firm called Mechanism Ventures. (...) > “I knew he wasn’t up to any good at that point in time,” Du Val told CNBC.
Starting a company is suspicious?
> Part of the scheme involved Grosz’s plan to create a company called Cavalry, which was designed to directly compete with Toptal.
Is starting a competing company not allowed, somehow?
> Cavalry poached several executives and top employees from Toptal to weaken the company, according to Du Val’s lawsuit.
Is hiring from competition illegal? Genuine question. Seems like another company is being sued for poaching as well
> The negative coverage, the suit says, led Toptal to lose contracts with current and future clients.
I'd love to see some examples. Apparently the judge decided that the negative coverage cost Toptal about $500k (as per compensatory damages). Is this a lot? Wikipedia says Toptal had $100mm revenue in 2016.
I expected a bit more meat in an article titled `How...`
It also shows part of the sentence after "The evidence presented at trial revealed a deliberate, purposeful plot — committed to writing — to attack Toptal, with the ultimate goal of bankrupting the company,", which says:
> The evidence showed that a critical piece of that attack was Mechanism's wrongful solicitation of numerous Toptal core team members, many of whom had been at Toptal for years and held important positions at the company, as well as members of Toptal's talent network
Is hiring from competition really illegal in the US?
It sounds like someone wanted to have it both ways after signing a convertible note with a promise that it would convert but instead decided they wanted to keep it as a loan. Uncool if true. Don't make speculative predictions or make promises you can't keep.
“The trial resulted in jurors finding that while Toptal did everything of significance it was required to do under its contract with Grosz, Grosz had breached the contract, harming Toptal.”
Source: https://www.law.com/2023/11/13/latham-nets-freelance-platfor...
Bloomberg also has an article stating that the jury evaluated fraud and breach against Toptal, which Grosz lost. If Toptal did “everything of significance” and was found not liable for fraud or breach, then the jury concluded that Toptal did not mislead him or do anything wrong.
Rather large error on the "investors" part to document all the fraud in writing.