How I Sold My Company to Twitter, Went to Facebook, and Screwed My Co-Founders | Hacker News Reader

How I Sold My Company to Twitter, Went to Facebook, and Screwed My Co-Founders

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49 pointstaigeair22 comments

So the screw over was that the company fetched 5 million instead of 10?

Assuming a 3-way split, 1.66 million versus 3.33 million each? He had to take a least a million dollar hit in that scenario, or did Facebook give him something else besides a job? Is a job at Facebook worth over a half a million dollars?

At level ~E5/E6 in New York or California, yes.

I messed up my comment, supposed to read "over a million and a half" I could see ~500k MAYBE but 1.5million....

more to the point, is the difference between a job at facebook now, and taking a job at twitter for a few years before possibly joining facebook if he still wanted to, worth half a million dollars? it definitely wouldn't be to me, but then again he seemed to have a strong "facebook is the future; i need to be there" feeling that i have a hard time relating to.

You're forgetting the investors, who get the lion share.

A $5M acquisition means pocket money for the founders.

In the book, it explains that the pre-ipo stock he was granted at FB was approximately equivalent to what he would have gotten from the Twitter acquisition.

"Products that cause mothers to murder their infants in order to use them more, assuming they’re legal, simply cannot fail in the world."

All this is perfectly normal. Somehow.

A better assessment might be that it is normalized. We don't have to like it, but it is what it is.

Why is a job at FB worth more than a ~$10M acquisition?

Talking completely out of my ass, we don't know what kind of package they were offering him. 10 mill isn't all for one person. Maybe he could make more over the coming years at FB than he would from a share of 10 mill after investors cash out.

Or maybe he was genuinely more excited about working at FB.

Do investors get no say when negotiating an acquisition?

Could they compell you to take a position at a company as a condition of the deal? Or maybe more importantly would they even bother? A single offhand comment about not wanting to work there could torpedo the deal.

Seriously, there were no specifics here about how much each founder got of the 5 million and how much each founder got out of the 10 million. Taking the simplest view of 1/3 split, he screwed himself (and his outher founders) out of 1.33 million $. Doesnt seem worth it

Lot's of people are talking about investor's cashing out, if they had investors would this dude have been able to unilaterally force a worse deal so he could work at Facebook, seems unlikely

Isn't this a dupe? I seem to recall reading it.

It has been posted 8 times in the last 6 months

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=How%20I%20Sold%20My%20Company%...

I read the book. He seems like an extremely unlikable guy, what with all his cheesy pick-up stories and his hatred of ad-blockers.

However, all-in-all, it was a great read. I liked his take on Zuckerberg thinking of himself as Alexander -- "Google delenda est" -- or the vignette where the Facebook VP asked "What is Facebook?", and the perky-possibly-a-plant intern responded "it's not your social network, it's your personal newspaper!".

It's worth trudging through the annoying self-promoting stuff for the insider takes imo.

The "insider takes" are comical exaggerations and little else. The self-promoting isn't a "veneer" to look past - it's the substance.

> I work in an open office, and have been to Facebook's open office campus many times. I love working in an open office, and think Facebook's campus looks excellent.

> Facebook Messenger has all of those advantages and even more, since your name is your identity and not something that requires exchange like a phone number.

> These are shitty glasses that are already being billed as <$150. (On Snapchat)

> Is there any evidence for this claim that a Tweet has more "cultural significance" than a Facebook post with objectively higher engagement?

You seem like one of the "true believers" he talks about.

I work in the Bay Area and I have opinions on technology - a stunning indictment.

People are often repulsed by those who are willing to tell them the frank truth, but these people are indeed among the most valuable input sources available in life.

Self-promoters are worth studying because they understand and willfully exploit elements of the human decision-making apparatus that most people don't like to discuss, because it's not fun to admit how unsophisticated we truly are.

His similes take it past my pain point.

>Managing a combined deal between Facebook and Twitter was like trying to engineer simultaneous orgasm between a premature ejaculator and a frigid woman: nigh impossible, fraught with danger, and requiring a very steady hand.

The juvenile jokes are unbearable, but his reckless bridge-burning makes it just barely worthwhile to get through the whole thing.

I wouldn't give him money for it, let's put it that way. If you find it used, though, it's worth a read.

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