It's like spending your worthless bitcoin on pizza.
StabilityAI cofounder says CEO tricked him into selling stake for $100
191–200 of 239 posts
Re: StabilityAI cofounder says CEO tricked him into selling stake for $100
#192Odd story. The point at which you're selling your stake for $100, you've basically decided to give it away. Which raises the question: if he was just going to get $100 and nothing more, why not just hang on to it?
Key information is obviously being omitted. Unfortunately like most modern journalism it's maximising for outrage not accuracy.
Re: StabilityAI cofounder says CEO tricked him into selling stake for $100
#193[dead]
Re: StabilityAI cofounder says CEO tricked him into selling stake for $100
#194Odd story. The point at which you're selling your stake for $100, you've basically decided to give it away. Which raises the question: if he was just going to get $100 and nothing more, why not just hang on to it?
It's obviously not for the $100, that's just a small, round value to make it legal (some money has to change hands, even if just $1.) Likely the CEO explains that it's worth nothing, they're re-organizing things for such and such a purpose, and the 15% stake in the cap tables is an inconvenience preventing a possible deal. Please could you do us a favor and help us clear that from the cap table. I'm the kind of perso…
Oh, I felt that. That's we I need an always on AI assistant game theory optimizer.
Re: StabilityAI cofounder says CEO tricked him into selling stake for $100
#195Corporations do not benefit from open source as a phenomenon. Another attack on Emad from Forbes, which is clearly paid for and lobbies for the interests of AI giants.
Re: StabilityAI cofounder says CEO tricked him into selling stake for $100
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
There seem to be 2 problems here: 1. Giving another party 49% doesn't guarantee you will have retaining control. You having 51% shares does guarantee that. So, their strategy was flawed. 2. Not sure if regulations allow this, but to make it bullet proof they should have made a contract that the PR group will not go beyond 49%. Without either of the above, the company just did not do good diligence.
> Not sure if regulations allow this, but to make it bullet proof they should have made a contract that the PR group will not go beyond 49%. Can this ever work? The PR group can control the 2% without nominally owning it.
I think Beneficial Ownership bans this now and make it a criminal thing if you have control over an entity (regardless of ownership) and you don't declare that.
Re: StabilityAI cofounder says CEO tricked him into selling stake for $100
#197This story by itself might sound like sour grapes, but in combination with other reports about the CEO(1), I suspect bad news ahead for Stability's investors. It seems like a narcissist with a very 'dynamic' relationship with the truth chased the AI hype train and ended up with a bunch of money and attention due to a stupid VC. He pissed off the teams that invented Latent Diffusion and his partners at RunwayML in the…
The finance side of the AI boom is just the crypto bros chasing a new hustle. Before that they were the Uber for x/y as a service people. It's a shame we can't get things financed without these PT Barnum clown cars
I'm not convinced they are throwing money at nothing this time. If you look into my post history (don't, I'll give you a tl/dr) you can see me being fairly critical about the state of LLMs, but also that I find them incredibly useful for some things. GPT basically writes 95% of our documentation now, only the code we absolutely don't want to share with the internet is still be documented by hand. And that is just a tiny bit of how the new AI boom is actually useful. My wife works with dyslexic people, and the amount of usability AI has in terms of turning the written word into audio is outright amazing. I'm sure this will be hard on a lot of voice actors, copy writers and so on, but AI can do those jobs and a lot of other things.
To me that means that, unlike blockchain, there is actually a viable product behind all the AI hype, and unlike Uber companies have already started selling it rather than waiting for it to become profitable through scale.
Maybe it's just me but the AI hype reminds me a lot more of the dotcom era than any of the recent hype cycles. Of course this means that for every Amazon or Google there will be 9 million failures, and unlike the dotcom era, it's likely that it'll be Google (or most likely Microsoft) who hits the jackpot, meaning it'll be even harder to find the right investment opportunities this time, but I don't think it's a fad.
Re: StabilityAI cofounder says CEO tricked him into selling stake for $100
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zuckerberg (and a small group of other Meta shareholders) hold shares that have 10x as much voting power as normal shares. He has about 90% of those special shares, giving him a solid majority in most matters. Some other companies like Lyft or Alphabet have similar structures, but it is very unusual.
I'm actually surprised it's not more common. If I buy meta stock I have zero expectation of being able to sway company decisions. I just care that if they make money I make money.
How do you expect to make money with zero control?
Re: StabilityAI cofounder says CEO tricked him into selling stake for $100
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The buyer usually waits until the very last minute, then drops the bomb on the seller "Btw, we can't do the deal anymore at this price, but we can sign tomorrow for 30% less". The sad part is it's such a common tactic and PE firms will do things like encourage founders to get their whole team excited about the transaction -before- dropping the bomb / new deal terms. At which point the founder is basically trapped w…
“You have to be prepared to walk away.”
At a first approximation, negotiating power in most things is proportional to your credibility to abandon a deal.
As soon as a counterparty knows you can't / won't, you're negotiating from a much worse position.
Re: StabilityAI cofounder says CEO tricked him into selling stake for $100
#200This dude very well may be better off with the 100 bucks at this point. The company is bleeding money at a ridiculous rate, so they're going to need to fundraise shortly. Given how little they have to show for their initial funding, they're going to struggle to attract any further investments. The initial investors already look like absolute clowns for giving a $1B valuation to a company whose primary selling points…
The dude might well be better off in the near future when the hype passes and company is worth its fair price of $50.