It's common to find this kind of asshole behavior in residential real estate agents. It can be understood when you realize they get a commision as a fraction of the sale price. This does NOT make their interests align with yours! Unintuitively, it is usually in their interest to sell your home as cheaply as possible (!) in order to sell QUICKLY. They would much rather sell your $1M house in two weeks as opposed to a $1.2M price which would take them four weeks of work. Their payday in terms of income per week of effort is far far higher in the lowball case.. the one that screws you, their "client", out of significant money.
Don't work with assholes
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Re: Don't work with assholes
#52> With a young family and a new life beginning, I did not want to ruin the limited time I have on this earth with my loved ones being a dad whose head is somewhere else, rather than enjoying these moments together. This a*hole wasn't worth it. I paid him off to leave us alone. While understandable from his POV, I'm disappointed to see the guy getting paid for services not rendered, and so reinforcing his tactics.
As an ex-lawyer I'd say this was 100% a good decision. As a profession we make our living off people who say "Dammit I won't pay, it's the principle, it's wrong & immoral." I, and I suspect many other lawyers, would always reply that principles cost a fortune in money time and grey hairs. I had plenty of clients and didn't need to litigate for billable hours.
> As an ex-lawyer I'd say this was 100% a good decision
For him personally. He complained that the double-asterisk hole acted in self-interest. Then he did the same.
Re: Don't work with assholes
#53this is sort of besides the point of the article, but why do people make businesses to sell them? as a scientist, i am not terribly interested in giving away the ideas that i have worked on for, typically, years. i become quite invested in them and continue to pursue them and evolve them until the funding runs out or new interests pop up that are worth replacing the old ones (typically this is an evolution as well).…
We had a small IT business. In our case, I discovered that I dislike all the sales, networking, and marketing stuff - which was dominating my time.
Our attempts to outsource that just didn't work: marketing companies are happy to take your money, right up until you require them to meet sales targets.
So we sold, for a pittance really, but I got my life back.
Re: Don't work with assholes
#54> With a young family and a new life beginning, I did not want to ruin the limited time I have on this earth with my loved ones being a dad whose head is somewhere else, rather than enjoying these moments together. This a*hole wasn't worth it. I paid him off to leave us alone. While understandable from his POV, I'm disappointed to see the guy getting paid for services not rendered, and so reinforcing his tactics.
As an ex-lawyer I'd say this was 100% a good decision. As a profession we make our living off people who say "Dammit I won't pay, it's the principle, it's wrong & immoral." I, and I suspect many other lawyers, would always reply that principles cost a fortune in money time and grey hairs. I had plenty of clients and didn't need to litigate for billable hours.
It's great for lawyers if everyone thinks like that.
Re: Don't work with assholes
#55Honestly, this story is just unsatisfying with the level of details provided, and ends up with action that is opposite to its title - don't work with asshole, but pay them off when they make ridiculous demands?
Seems to me like the author signed a bad contract and was forced to comply, even though the services rendered were underwhelming.
Re: Don't work with assholes
#56This is a side noob question. Is there a platform/website/portal where such businesses are listed for sale and purchase? Like someone interested in selling their indie thingy? Or a company interested in buying few projects of specific type/niche/market etc?
Flippa is one such site.
For big deals - known brands etc, I would assume the only way to access those deals is knowing the brokers.
Re: Don't work with assholes
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an ex-lawyer I'd say this was 100% a good decision. As a profession we make our living off people who say "Dammit I won't pay, it's the principle, it's wrong & immoral." I, and I suspect many other lawyers, would always reply that principles cost a fortune in money time and grey hairs. I had plenty of clients and didn't need to litigate for billable hours.
> As an ex-lawyer I'd say this was 100% a good decision For him personally. He complained that the double-asterisk hole acted in self-interest. Then he did the same.
one acted in self interest by trying to take advantage of the other.
one acted in self interest by effectively paying the other to go away.
your comment is acting in self-interest.
so is mine.
but you don’t really think these all the same. so what point are you actually trying to prove?
Re: Don't work with assholes
#58Any way to proof that the author actually sold his company by a better price than initially said? Otherwise it's just a bad sci-fi. What I learned from this story? You're always the bad guy in someone's story. Specially if this someone has a blog, time to blog and get linked to HN.
The asshole was not named so the negative effect on the person is zero.
The author clearly states the moral to not work with people where the alarm bells are ringing.
Re: Don't work with assholes
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you just outed yourself.
lol what? It's just that every story has two sides. Back in the days I had a small ISP and we engaged someone to sell it. In my opinion it was the best ISP in the world, in his opinion (seller) it was just one more product that he was selling. So i can imagine that other people selling their company feel like their are selling their own baby, and that's their baby are super special, but for people doing M&A, it's lik…
There's a difference between your business being just another business, and your broker intentionally under-valuing your company so that their own acquisition farm can acquire you cheap then flip you for the actual market value and pocket the difference.
The first is a reality of business. The second is a conflict of interest, immoral, rude, and should be illegal.
Re: Don't work with assholes
#60" In spite of my intuition telling me not to." Always go with your intuition "There was a lot of work to do to get the materials together for him. I invested months of time in a back-and-forth with him, with me compiling and developing this information." ROTFL. Old story. You have an seriously interested buyer? Charge a non-reimbursable upfront payment that will be credited towards the deal, should there be one. This…
Well, we have to ask to share the story "talking about license deals when talking about a VC investment"