I feel like Ron Wayne entry in this list is off in so many ways
>Ron Wayne was technically a co-founder of Apple Computer, but he chose to leave after only 12 days. He paid the price by missing out on millions, if not billions, when he sold his 10 percent share of the company for $800.
He chose to leave the company himself because he didn't believe (at the time) that Apple would succeed. That was his choice, he did not get pushed out. Obviously (in hindsight!) this was a bad mistake, but at the time it was not and nobody could even imagine the succes apple would turn out to be. Hindsight is always 20/20 guys.
Larry David is working for an energy-efficient car startup as chief of marketing, gets fired days before it goes huge for objecting to the name of first model of the car, Howard, and well, loses out in a huge payout and goes dark and flees to reinvent himself.
Well since I despise sneaky corporate behavior; I'll give my
honest, brief review of Esty. I was introduced to the site
because it was the only site my sister seemed to like--a few years ago? I looked at it and was immediately impressed. It reminded me of the annual Fourth of July fair. Where once a year artisans would sell their crafts(my annual purchase was a hand tooled belt, with a copper buckle). This was in the late 70's. This company had kinda recreated that experience.
Actually, strike that last sentence. The site didn't come
close to recreating that fair, or level of craftsmanship, but
it was better than Ebay.
Jump ahead a few years. I now can't tell the crap from China
and India--from handmade local works of art, and each month it just gets worse. Good luck with your IPO--I imagine current management and slick Bankers, along with the usual list of insiders will make another killing. (I guarantee in a few years you will want the guy back who had the original vision! "What happened? Why are we loosing customers to that new site. That new site that has standards? I hope he makes you guys pay until it hurts.)
Are they really written out of history? Rob Kalin shows up as the first Google result for [etsy founder], is listed on the knowledge panel for [etsy], is the first name mentioned on the Wikipedia article for Etsy, and is mentioned several times there. Eduardo Saverin had a whole movie made about him, and Ron Wayne features prominently in Steve Wozniak's autobiography.
Similarly, Comedy Central elimnated any mention of Craig Kilborn in relation to the Daily Show on their website. They don't host any back episodes with him, and relatively few are found elsewhere (recording and posting shows on the Internet/P2P was not as popular at the turn of the century).
Searching again, they do have a bio for him [0], but it has no mention of his role on the show, and they don't even give him the curtesy of being listed as an alumn.
In the current newscycle world you don't even have to try. Somebody remembers the shot plane over Ukraine or Ebola? They were a big deal not a few months ago and suddenly disappeared.
Just stop pushing the PR for something and it will go to obscurity on its own.
He was the founder, and obviously (because he is no longer in the picture) decided to sell or give away enough equity in the company to the point that he no longer held a controlling interest. Thus he no longer plays any part in the company's goings on and rightfully so.
That was his decision, and nobody elses.
One has to assume that he was content with it at the time.
If he still held 51% or more of the company and still wished to be a part of Etsy, he easily could have done so. So could have basically every other founder in history.
If Steve Jobs knew that Apple would go on to become the most valuable company in the world one day, and that Mike Markkula was going to vote him out of his own company a decade later, he probably wouldn't have sold him 30% of the company for $80,000 either.
Yes, but not for the reasons you list. The article cites Eduardo Saverin, who is not at all forgotten thanks to The Social Network. It lists Noah Glass, who was only involved in Twitter in the early days. It lists Ron Wayne, who was a Co-Founder of Apple for less than two weeks. It lists founders of Pandora, who left long before its IPO. And yet one of Etsy's founders, with the company from 2005 to 2011, is forgotten?
> He was the founder
He was one of three founders [1]
> and [...] decided to sell or give away enough equity in the company to the point that he no longer held a controlling interest. Thus he no longer plays any part in the company's goings on and rightfully so.
So if you don't control 51% of the company, you don't play ANY part in the company's goings on?
> If he still held 51% or more of the company and still wished to be a part of Etsy, he easily could have done so. So could have basically every other founder in history.
How do you 'still' hold 51% of the company with two co-founders?
> and obviously (because he is no longer in the picture) decided to sell or give away enough equity in the company to the point that he no longer held a controlling interest.
Not completely obvious: It is possible that his shares were diluted into oblivion.
Apple probably wouldn't have been the success that it was without someone like Markula.
As for whether it was Kalin's decision and his alone, there is no doubt that it was his and the other co-founders decision to raise money and do it by selling equity.
Whether it was his decision to be removed as CEO, that seems less likely. And was he asked to leave or play a different role, I have no idea.
It's probably not ridiculous, but the idea is overemphasized and taken as gospel in America -- and, I think, has been responsible for a lot of bad, short term decisions over time.
Tim Cook seems to agree with him: “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI. [Apple works on] a lot of things for reasons besides profit motive. We want to leave the world better than we found it [...] If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock.”
Of course it's easier to say this when you're Tim Cook or Larry Page.
Well, it's not that clear-cut. Kalin raised the first money personally, a good chunk of it from family, and hired the people to whom he later granted the title 'co-founder'. They had much, much less equity from day one, and cashed out in the first rounds of investment.
Also worth noting: there was an interesting Fred Wilson blog post about dealing with Kalin and his quirks that has since been deleted. The gist of it, as I recall, was that Kalin saw himself as an 'artist' and not a manager - a notion Wilson found unsettling for the CEO of a portfolio company.
As for what Rob is up to these days, he's recently bought a warehouse in the Catskills and is turning it into a hive of artisan workshops with a restaurant downstairs. Apparently everything in the restaurant (tables, chairs, silverware, lighting) will be made in the warehouse. So basically, he's building a Portlandia skit, but apparently he can afford it.
While I think this article is a little over dramatic, I think Rob Kalin probably did fine for himself, and historical account, let alone IPO account, does not equal personal happiness. To continue the conspiracy theory, Kalin seems to have previously been listed at the 25th richest under 30 on complex.com and now replaced by Mr Cullen which just so happens to rhyme with Kalin. http://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2012/08/the-25-richest-te...
The article says that it is unlikely that Kalim has a significant equity position in Etsy because he is not listed amongst the principal shareholders in the S-1.
The definition of principal shareholder here is: officer of the company, director on the board, or representing 5% or more equity stake.
Thus, Kalin could have as much as 4.99% of Etsy and still not be listed.
I would guess that Kalin has a significant equity stake in Etsy. It has no doubt seen dilution over time, but if I were a betting man, I would bet that unless he has already sold his shares in the secondary markets, his net worth will be a princely sum indeed.
You still have to pay for vested stock if you quit before an exercise event. I'm not saying he didn't do that, but it's hard for a lot of people to come up with that cash.
While that can be true for employees, founders' stock works differently than options granted to employees. When the company is started, founders write a check to the company for a very modest amount (~$100) and buy all of their equity up front. They can do this legally as, on day 1, the company doesn't have any real value.
And because the founder has already bought her equity with the $100 check, she never has to pay anything else. If she leaves, what's vested is hers.
Huh? Maybe I am clueless (very possible) but I payed for my at the time of what is sometimes called 'post incorporation'...are you sure you aren't talking about options...
You forget about taxes. By the time of exit the fair market value of the stock likely greatly exceeds option grant strikes to founders creating a massive tax liability in the form of capital gains. Likely in the hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars range.
This Bloomberg site is unique or, at least, among a tiny set of sites that has a fixed top banner and manages to page down/page up correctly. I spent several minutes just appreciating their implementation with my keyboard. Both page down and space bar work correctly and the progress marker in the header is nifty.
I personally find the progress bar very distracting and don't read Bloomberg articles any more because of it.
It's something to do with me always using mouse scrolling that jerks the screen by set increments, and that then animates the bar but it takes 250 ms or something, so I scroll, my eyes attempt to find the new position in the article, the bar animates, my eye gets drawn up to the bar instead.
It's so bad for me I find myself angry and frustrated whenever I read a Bloomberg article and it took me a while to realise it was something as simple and silly as a visuay distracting automated progress bar that is just a bit too slow to animate.
> Both page down and space bar work correctly and the progress marker in the header is nifty.
Truly, we live in the future. :/
(I also think it's remarkable how many sites seem willing to sacrifice basic usability concerns like page down & spacebar... and even scrolling performance is often put farther down the list than having the design fad of a fixed header that changes in dimensions/character a bit past a certain point.)
I've already got a progress bar. It's called the browser scrollbar.
A fixed header is one of the first things I remove from a site, usually taking it as an opportunity to remove everything else I find annoying as well.
Turns out Bloomberg's header requires JS to be enabled (I disabled it). But nope. Don't like the fixed header. It's like having a hat pulled down low over my eyes. In the damned way.
Huh? The Bloomberg site is the one I read most often that gets it completely wrong, at least on my browser (Chrome OS X). If I page up or down, it doesn't factor in the size of the fixed banner properly and I always lose visibility of several lines of text.
If I take "History is written by the victors, and that's especially true in the technology industry. Here are six other founders who didn't get any official recognition when their companies went public.", line things up so just the first line is visible at the bottom, and hit page down, I lose the rest of the paragraph every time.
Good, but not great. My browser seizes up briefly when loading a new section of infinity scroll, and the infinity scroll definitely breaks the scrollbar. I scroll to the middle, no, wait, now I'm at the top, I scroll to bottom, now I'm reading something else entirely, no, wait, now I'm in the middle of the page again, no wait, different article again.
>Ron Wayne was technically a co-founder of Apple Computer, but he chose to leave after only 12 days. He paid the price by missing out on millions, if not billions, when he sold his 10 percent share of the company for $800.
He chose to leave the company himself because he didn't believe (at the time) that Apple would succeed. That was his choice, he did not get pushed out. Obviously (in hindsight!) this was a bad mistake, but at the time it was not and nobody could even imagine the succes apple would turn out to be. Hindsight is always 20/20 guys.