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The Forgotten Founder: A Silicon Valley Tale of Humiliation and Revenge

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Re: The Forgotten Founder: A Silicon Valley Tale of Humiliation and Revenge

#101

Post by eeeeaaii »

PakG1 wrote: post #20
_sentient wrote: post #13

Did anyone else get the impression that this guy is a major slime ball? I'm sure YouSendIt has issues at the top, and it does sound like Kumaran may be a little glory hungry. But when you happily engage in vengeful DDOS attacks, shitty app spam, and flip apparently stolen websites, it paints a pretty clear picture of your character. I know I sure wouldn't want a guy like Shaikh working for me. Not in a million years.

Ditto. The guy bled for the company yeah, but the reason why I feel sympathy for him is not because he was kicked out despite working so hard. Even though he might have bled for the company and worked with executives with questionable integrity and technical appreciation, he deserved to be kicked out as soon as he stole the switches and put them up on eBay. No, the reason why I feel sympathy for this guy is that he w…

Many people are socially awkward because they have bottled up rage or antisocial urges and need therapy. Sounds like this guy might have been in that category.

Re: The Forgotten Founder: A Silicon Valley Tale of Humiliation and Revenge

#103

Post by rwallace »

andyl wrote: post #25

It would have been valuable to Shaikh if he had someone he trusted who could counsel him to just chill and not shoot himself in the foot. What happened to him at YouSendIt doesn't seem fair to me, but sometimes life is that way. Now he could learn from his experience and give it another go. Good luck to Shaikh and his family.

I get the impression from the story that his second wife was trying to give him exactly that sort of counsel, but he didn't listen. If so, the moral of that story is, when someone you trust advises you to just chill and not shoot yourself in the foot, listen to her.

Re: The Forgotten Founder: A Silicon Valley Tale of Humiliation and Revenge

#104

Post by uzair88 »

drumdance wrote: post #19
uzair88 wrote: post #17

Ecellent read because it provides an alternate (and ugly) perspective of the often glorified (read techcrunch-ified) world of startups in the Valley. Shaikh has obviously made some big mistakes but take a minute to feel for the guy. He literally bled for the company to save some money so I can imagine the emotional rollercoaster he must have been on. Well written piece Inc.

I thought the bleeding part was gratuitous pseudo-symbolism. I cut myself fixing the washing machine the other day, but I would never say "I literally bled for the cause of clean clothes."

Symbolism or not, I think there's no denying the fact that he worked very hard during the early stages. My point is to highlight the fact that in light of his struggles, I can appreciate his frustrations. While the attacks are not justified, I can at least see the path of events that led to this act.

Re: The Forgotten Founder: A Silicon Valley Tale of Humiliation and Revenge

#105

Post by webwright »

ahoyhere wrote: post #79
coffeemug wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

522. By contrast, over 300 people are injured by lightning strikes per year, in the US. While I appreciate your point, this is a very flawed analogy. There are only a few thousand people in a position to shoot for an M&A each year, and a few hundred million people in a position to get hit by lightning. Relative to the number of adults in the U.S., very few people start companies that could potentially be scalable eac…

You and I agree that there are only "a few thousand" people in the US in a given year who are "in a position to shoot for an M&A." There are, however, at least 10x those numbers in hopefuls… people who believe that they could do it, even though they never will be able to, and many of those people get funding and end up with nothing to show for it but a few wasted years of life. Meanwhile because of the 522 M&As etc w…

I agree with some of your sentiments, but you'd make a stronger point if you didn't play math games.

You are citing Dow Jones Venturesource exits. First off, they are tracking venture-backed companies. So your denominator in that particular fraction isn't people shooting for M&A someday-- it's a tiny slice of companies that get VC dollars. How many TOTAL VC backed companies exist? 5k? 50k? I honestly have no idea, but comparing it to people getting struck by lightning is just silly.

Second, you mention an 8 million dollar sale as your example. $71M was the median in those 522 exits (http://www.dowjones.com/pressroom/releases/2011/01032012-VCE...).

All that aside, I think this whole argument just shouldn't be happening. I think we're all in agreement that the funded path is higher risk and higher reward.

Re: The Forgotten Founder: A Silicon Valley Tale of Humiliation and Revenge

#107

Post by ahoyhere »

webwright wrote: post #105
ahoyhere wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You and I agree that there are only "a few thousand" people in the US in a given year who are "in a position to shoot for an M&A." There are, however, at least 10x those numbers in hopefuls… people who believe that they could do it, even though they never will be able to, and many of those people get funding and end up with nothing to show for it but a few wasted years of life. Meanwhile because of the 522 M&As etc w…

I agree with some of your sentiments, but you'd make a stronger point if you didn't play math games. You are citing Dow Jones Venturesource exits. First off, they are tracking venture-backed companies. So your denominator in that particular fraction isn't people shooting for M&A someday-- it's a tiny slice of companies that get VC dollars. How many TOTAL VC backed companies exist? 5k? 50k? I honestly have no idea, bu…

Speaking of numbers games, you use "median" when we all know that median exit is valueless without information about distribution. Mode is much more valuable. But that data is not available. However, if you pay attention to the publicized acquisitions which happen fairly often, the amounts are most often under $10m.

As for whether my number comparisons make good dialectic sense or not, it doesn't matter. This isn't dialectic, it's rhetoric. It's a tool for thinking about something. There's no point in pretending we're even attempting to approach Absolute Truth here.

As a tool for thinking about something, a contrast of M&As vs lightning strike injuries is quite valuable. Because we all "know" people who have been bought, but very few of us know people who have been injured by lightning. This shows us that we're in a bubble, a slice of unreality, where the availability heuristic skews our deeply felt understanding of likelihood.

Finally, yes. Dow Jones Venturesource tracks only venture-backed companies. Everyone on HN seems to agree that achieving venture funding is not only important for growth, but important for the connections the VC has to people who would buy the startup. Presumably that belief has some grounding in fact. This leads us to the conclusion that an acquisition is more likely when there is VC involved than not.

Re: The Forgotten Founder: A Silicon Valley Tale of Humiliation and Revenge

#108

Post by ahoyhere »

temphn wrote: post #94
jacquesm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vastly many more people get rich with 'lifestyle' companies than get rich with moonshots. They won't be as obscenely rich but several million is definitely nothing strange (Euros or Dollars, pick your poison). VC's won't touch such businesses (and they shouldn't) because the return rate is not worth the hassle for them but that is just a matter of perspective. For founders the life style businesses are typically a sa…

> Vastly many more people get rich with 'lifestyle' companies than get rich with moonshots. Not being combative, but can you justify that statement with data? It just seems implausible to me, given that the moonshot companies tend to employ a lot more people. Yes, relatively few companies become "big deals", but those companies (Adobe, MS, Google, Facebook, Apple) are the ones that actually employ most of the people…

They are all around you. My business. Gravity Forms. Campaign Monitor. Harvest. Peepcode. Marc-André Cournoyer. WooThemes. Tick. Envato. Beanstalk & Postmark. And on and on and on. These are just some of the folks I know personally, in our space. I could name so many more in other industries. There are so many more, everywhere. You're soaking in it.

Most of these people are too busy making bank to blog about it (or they simply don't care to be recognized as business experts).

Why do you equate headcount with riches? As one of the richest people to ever write a business book, Felix Dennis says "Overhead walks on two legs." It was an important enough statement for him to include it at least 3 times in one little book. That should tell us something.

Employing people isn't a correlation to riches. Employees cost a lot of money.

As for "tech businesses"… Harvest has been virtually the same for years and years. So has my "competitor" to Harvest, Freckle. It doesn't matter. Your model of "tech biz obsolescence" is dependent on a winner-take-all scenario. Real business -- what you call "lifestyle business" -- doesn't operate that way.

Re: The Forgotten Founder: A Silicon Valley Tale of Humiliation and Revenge

#109

Post by faboo »

swang wrote: post #84
CamperBob wrote: post #43

(Kumaran recalls telling the investor he couldn't speak because of confidentiality and antidisparagement agreements.) Memo: when writing an antidisparagement agreement, the first rule of antidisparagement agreements is that you agree not to disclose the existence of the antidisparagement agreement.

In fact couldn't it be argued that admitting that there is an antidisparagement agreement is in fact disparagement because you acknowledge that something happened to cause said agreement to be entered into? IANAL.

I don't think you'd easily win the argument, unless the parties involved generally didn't sign non-disparagement agreements.

I was once laid off from a company that gave me a small (but significant to me) severance check in exchange for signing a non-disparagement agreement. I did jokingly refer to that check as my "hush money", but I had no actual issue with the company or any of my former coworkers. That company did it simply as a matter of course, I imagine to make the laying off process more predictable.

(And I was pretty appreciative of the check itself; between it and my left over vacation days, I made it pretty comfortably to my next position.)

Re: The Forgotten Founder: A Silicon Valley Tale of Humiliation and Revenge

#110

Post by [deleted] »

temphn wrote: post #94
jacquesm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vastly many more people get rich with 'lifestyle' companies than get rich with moonshots. They won't be as obscenely rich but several million is definitely nothing strange (Euros or Dollars, pick your poison). VC's won't touch such businesses (and they shouldn't) because the return rate is not worth the hassle for them but that is just a matter of perspective. For founders the life style businesses are typically a sa…

> Vastly many more people get rich with 'lifestyle' companies than get rich with moonshots. Not being combative, but can you justify that statement with data? It just seems implausible to me, given that the moonshot companies tend to employ a lot more people. Yes, relatively few companies become "big deals", but those companies (Adobe, MS, Google, Facebook, Apple) are the ones that actually employ most of the people…

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