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Mark Zuckerberg Signed the Wrong Document

bloombergview.com

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Re: Mark Zuckerberg Signed the Wrong Document

#3
More surprising to me than this article was the fact that Bloomberg has spiraled off a completely different brand for editorials/commentary/opinion. It amazes me that Bloomberg View which bears the Bloomberg brand has no clear explanation of what it is, and that it is only commentary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_News

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Signed the Wrong Document

#4
post #2

OK, but who was the legal eagle or director who gave him the wrong form? I would expect that somebody besides Zuckerberg had a job to get it right, and probably should be on the hook for screwing up one way or another.

Yes.I would imagine Z. just signs whatever the lawyers produce for him to sign after the meeting. I wonder what the outcome will be now? Doesn’t this ruling just give the lawyers the right to sue and they now have to prove the compensation was excessive?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Signed the Wrong Document

#5
I feel kind of bad for Mark here.

There is an entire cottage industry of firms that will do nothing but look for ways to use these types of procedural errors to extract money from companies.

There are law firms whose sole form of income is to have hedge funds send them their daily trades so they can cross reference them against companies who had to restate earnings, the implication being that if hedge fund A owned some stock during the period where the firm had released the improper numbers and when the firm refiled then the fund can claim they were fraudulently mislead into buying the shares even though the refiling might not have mattered at all.

As to the second part of the story about private companies, this is something that alot of people are trying to figure out.

The last 5 years have been defined by private companies "disrupting" things where they try to have their cake and eat it to.

- Want to be a taxi when it works for you but don't want all the rules, regulations, laws and taxes taht go along with it? No problem, just pretend there are no such thing as taxi laws.

- Want the benefit of people to work and the ability to define how they do their job for you but don't want to bother yourself with things like payroll taxes, workers comp payments, no problem just declare that you don't have contractors or employees but some new form of worker. The IRS just ins't smart enough to see your vision...

Now we have companies who want the benefits of being public

- access to capital as they need it

- ability for founders to cash out their shares

- rising share prices to entice employee's with so they won't focus on the below market wage you pay.

but don't want to petty baggage that goes along with it:

- how dare someone short my company and point out its flaws

- I and only I will pick my share holders,

- I don't want to release earnings of any kind to my shareholders, I only want true believers who won't worry about things like profit.

- Why are people asking about earnings, just look at my growth numbers and those numbers only.

I think most people agree that there needs to be some reform to make it easier for companies to go public but if companies think that being "disruptive" is a technique that will work with the SEC, then that's one battle I don't think silicon valley will win.

Or put another way, for all of Silicon Valley's impact over the past 50 years, its had about zero impact on the process of companies going public. When companies go public they all play ball by Wall Street and the SEC's rules.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Signed the Wrong Document

#6
post #2

OK, but who was the legal eagle or director who gave him the wrong form? I would expect that somebody besides Zuckerberg had a job to get it right, and probably should be on the hook for screwing up one way or another.

I'm not sure if they gave him the wrong form. As long as they didn't get sued for paying their directors too much, there was nothing wrong with signing as a director. I guess that they just didn't considered the option of getting sued over that.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Signed the Wrong Document

#7
There is a startup plan that is basically a cookie cutter plan that a lot of startup follow.

1. Invent new technology/software/website.

2. Get VCs to invest in it.

3. Sell ads on the website and use ML to target people with those ads.

4. IPO to go public to raise up the stock price.

5. Issue yourself a different type of stock that has different voting rights so you retain control of your company.

6. Keep investing new stuff for growth and sell off shares to raise more money.

The problem is people who become CEO without ever taking a business management class or understanding how a business or the laws that effect it work. Steve Jobs found it hard and resigned from Apple in 1985 and had to go back to college to learn business management to learn how to manage a company better. It paid off when Apple merged with Next and Jobs knew how to manage Apple better than he did in 1985.

We haven't seen Bitstock companies yet that trade on Bitcoin instead of the US Dollar. Nobody ever thought to make a Bitstock market based on Bitcoin. You just modify Bitcoin to issue shares of stock called Bitstock and you have issues the company puts that Bitstock can vote on based on what type of Bitstock it is, and then you avoid the lawsuits of signing the wrong document because Bitstock replaces that old system with a new one. Zuck just votes with his Bitsock on each issue and makes it official no need to sign documents anymore.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Signed the Wrong Document

#8

There is a startup plan that is basically a cookie cutter plan that a lot of startup follow. 1. Invent new technology/software/website. 2. Get VCs to invest in it. 3. Sell ads on the website and use ML to target people with those ads. 4. IPO to go public to raise up the stock price. 5. Issue yourself a different type of stock that has different voting rights so you retain control of your company. 6. Keep investing ne…

1. facebook did not "invent" anything, especially compared to Google, they copied text entry boxes and messaging, which anybody could easily duplicate from myspace and reworked the design. Google invented something.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Signed the Wrong Document

#9
post #8

There is a startup plan that is basically a cookie cutter plan that a lot of startup follow. 1. Invent new technology/software/website. 2. Get VCs to invest in it. 3. Sell ads on the website and use ML to target people with those ads. 4. IPO to go public to raise up the stock price. 5. Issue yourself a different type of stock that has different voting rights so you retain control of your company. 6. Keep investing ne…

1. facebook did not "invent" anything, especially compared to Google, they copied text entry boxes and messaging, which anybody could easily duplicate from myspace and reworked the design. Google invented something.

Facebook was very innovative, just not technically innovative. Their two big innovations were the real name policy and only letting in elite uni students to create social demand. Both seem obvious in hindsight, but nobody else at the time implemented both of these policies.
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