Don't work with assholes

> This is the part that I don't get either. I can imagine hearing "this coffee shop got better since the new owners", but I know I have heard "this place used to be good until it changed owners". And since the new owners have paid X years of profit which they arguably want to recover in less than X years, it is more than likely that they'll start cutting costs as a result.

To be fair, I know at least one case of "this coffee shop got better since the new owners", but to be fair, it's because coffee shops are not really comparable to startups - namely because a very unsuccessful café can still hold huge real estate value.

Namely, in this case I'm talking about a café near a city center and a huge office building, but it was very dark, had old moldy sandwiches exposed and mixed low quality coffee with the brand coffee.

As you can imagine, after it was acquired by the new owners they just had to redecorate and sell normal products, and it quickly got packed every day.

Not sure if there's any possible equivalent for tech companies, though.

I can't help myself and have to speculate how to reverse UNO this: Basically the scam works because as a "defender" in this legal attack our plucky founder has to do a good and expensive job defending himself while the ass-tacker knowing he has no hope of winning can do a crappy bad job just dragging stuff out. The business relationship they had gives this probably enough of a cover to not get tossed out right away. Since generally in the US each party pays their own expenses this works for ass-tacker.

Now if you turn this around simply pay ass-tacker what he asked for then sue him for having done a bad job on the sale he had no part in but invoiced you for. Since ass-tacker now needs to defend he has to spend money disproportionately. There have to be legal firms that do this service for you.

>What did give me pause was how he handled negotiations over a clause in our potential agreement. He didn't listen to my concerns, and didn't budge one inch.

I've learned to listen to my gut in these situations. The worse your gut feeling is about an agreement, the harder you should push back on it until you can negotiate something that you're comfortable with. I usually give new relationships the benefit of the doubt once. Your first bad gut feeling can be wrong, but I've always regretted moving past a second bad gut feeling.

Be extremely suspicious if your counterpart tries to rush you through a contract negotiation process by downplaying the importance of the agreement while simultaneously refusing to budge on it.

> why would a business run the same without the person who did all the work doing it?

This is 100% a concern. If a business is successful because the founder puts in insane amount of work that makes it less valuable to buy.

You ask the question: What would happen if the founders take a multi-month vacation? If the business would keep pumping money, either because it is passive, or because they trained people well and the machine is working without them, then that is a good candidate to buy. If it would fall, or cease to be a business that is a bad business to buy.

And that's the flaw of the article. The author would not have known the broker was an asshole until they actually started working with them.

Sure you can decide to back out sooner, but then you still worked with the asshole if only for a short while.

The real problem is how to identify the asshole, which isn't much of a moral tale but a matter of experience and competence in screening people and attracting good people.