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Comment by nawitus | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if it's possible to make that promise a legally binding contract. Of course all startups say that they won't "go away", but most of them will even if they say they won't.

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While I can't think of a legal way to guarantee "not going away", you can legally guarantee a very strict privacy policy, good for 10 years counting from when the account was created. Future changes in privacy policy would not be able to cancel the 10 years promise, so any acquirer would be prevented from pushing ads. The acquirer could still kill the produce though.

You simply set aside money in an endowment fund (or other funding apparatus) and create a legal entity charged with the task of using the money in the fund to continue operations in the event the main company shuts down. Just add a clause in the legal framework of the organization which provides for the startup and handover operations, put individuals on a "board" of some sort who will begin drawing a salary when the organization is kicked into action, etc. It's not exactly rocket science.

The fact that so many companies who "plan to be around forever" haven't bothered to even think about these sorts of things indicates to me how fundamentally unseriously they take their own business.

I am confused. The fund is set up by the company itself right? So if things get so bad that the company has to shut down, BUT they have a fund big enough to keep running the company, why must they shut themselves down to tap into it? Why can't the original company simply use that money to keep operations running?

Because that's the only way to prove continuation of operations. Also notice the difference between continuing to provide services and continuing running the company as normal (which typically would involve lots os expenditures beyond the basics necessary to keep services running).

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