Remarkable that a venture-backed company can loan $10B to the founder's hedge fund without running into some sort of board/corporate sign-off that's required to literally execute the agreement/fund transfer.
The people who invest in venture funds need to demand better governance for portfolio companies, otherwise this will continue to happen.
I generally agree, but it's not "people," it's institutional funds (endowments, pension funds, etc). The way venture returns are distributed is that a small number of funds (of which Sequioia has historically been one) stand out from the rest in terms of returns. With the lengthy bull market that we have had until this year, VC was a high-performing asset class. Pension fund and endowment managers felt they needed to be in the asset class, which really meant being in those top 10 or so funds that were generating outsized returns. When LPs are competing to get into a few top funds, the funds have all the leverage. My sense is that LPs don't feel like they can make any kind of demands on the VC funds, for fear of being blocked out of investing.
Now we have a market turn and VC is unlikely to sustain the returns of the past decade. That may shift the leverage, but history suggests that LPs will still not put any kind of meaningful pressure on the top funds to do anything different.