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Comment by stigi | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how such things become possible. As co-founders shouldn't you have a written (and lawyer checked) agreement on how the company is shared amongst you?

How can one betray the other besides of letting him/her unknowingly sign an unfortunate contract?

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Projects like that are usually made between friends and aren't really expected to become THAT big. Plus, it doesn't really matter, they took the guy out of the business and took away his rightful part of it. Good thing they settled.

So you're the three of em just had a verbal arrangement and not a signed contract detailing company divisions?

They did, but shared the document via Snapchat.

You can read all the sordid details here:

http://www.businessinsider.com/reggie-brown-sues-snapchat-in...

"At this point, Brown and the Individual Defendants…entered into an explicit oral agreement as to their respective interests in their joint undertaking to develop the Application…That explicit agreement was that their interests in the venture would be equally distributed, i.e. each of them would have 1/3 ownership and profit interests in the joint venture/partnership."

Yeah, verbal agreements aren't worth squat. At best, you get a settlement, at worst you get nothing. I'm surprised these guys didn't sign contracts amongst themselves.

Agreed - It seems like verbal agreements are just invitations to future abuse. Humans are very good at ignoring limitations when convenient. Codifying them is the only way we keep things fair.

Contracts (written just as much as verbal) don't magically enforce themselves. They just provide evidence of the substance of an agreement in the legal action when one side thinks they were violated.

And friends starting something together often don't anticipate it becoming a source of friction in the future, and don't do what you'd expect people in an arms-length relationship to do. Sure, anyone whose been around the block once will likely have learned -- and lots of people will learn before they've been around the block themselves. But quite a lot of people won't, or will learn but think that it doesn't really apply to the little project their doing with their friends, and by the time they realize that they should have, they'll be enough money already involved that what one side sees as a "reasonable division" will be what the other side sees as "cheating me out of what I am due".

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