Hacker News Reader

Comment by jforman | Hacker News Reader

Mitch has invested in a company I founded before, and I would have him as an investor again in a heartbeat.

Your relationship with your investors and your board is both public and private (or at least, it's supposed to be). Yes, you are owed a private space to discuss difficult internal matters. But your investors are also responsible for getting you ready to be a public company, and that means holding you accountable when you've fallen below the threshold of what would be acceptable to public shareholders. As the letter notes, "accountable" by definition means in the open and out of your total control.

Mitch and Freada are doing Uber's shareholders a service (and therefore also doing Travis a service) by helping the company clean house before they're exposed to the harsher sunlight of being a public company. If you wouldn't have them as investors as a result, then you're not ready to be held accountable by others and aren't public CEO material.

View on HN

fron the perspective of some founders, its easier to take the dumb money from overseas investment and sovereign wealth funds as you get the benefit of the funds but without the baggage of a minority investor with a blog who wants to change the world.

You may be confusing, "thinks they're changing the world," with something more like, "Trying not to do any more harm than necessary."

Mitch and Freada have already well accomplished "changing the world." Travis has many years to go yet before he can even be considered to be in the same league.

As they say, GIGO. Feel free to take on garbage investors, but don't be surprised if your probability of success goes down as a result.

Skimming their portfolio, it seems like their biggest accomplishment is actually funding Uber.

http://www.kaporcapital.com/portfolio/

Can you name something they've done that has had a more positive effect on the world than Uber has?

Mitch Kapor founded Lotus, the EFF, Kapor Capital, and the Kapor Center for Social Impact. I don't know exactly where his wife contributed among those things, but they generally refer to themselves as a unit these days so I do, too.

He's invested in UUNET (!), Real Networks, Asana, AngelList, Dropcam, Omada Health, Optimizely, Twilio, and many more startups.

He was the founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation.

And much more. He is a lion of industry, having made his mark across multiple generations. Uber is important, but it's one company whose wins are not yet even solidified. Travis isn't even close to being in the same league yet.

If Optimizely and Asana stopped existing, most people would never notice. They would definitely notice if Uber vanished.

Doubly so if the fixes Uber made to city governments were also to vanish.

Do you know who Mitch Kapor is? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Kapor

I don't believe their public letter helps Uber -- it just puts Kapor Capital in an antagonistic relationship with Uber in general and likely Travis in particular, and weakens the plan Uber has committed to (bringing in a former AG, already familiar with the company, with very little delay, to do an investigation -- he's not an outsider, but I respect his integrity more than a completely random attorney), before we've even seen if it produces good results.

I can't tell how much of this was because Uber decided to find someone themselves, vs. relying on Kapor's Project Include.

There is a difference between "held accountable" (which would be shareholder/board actions) and "throwing bricks through the window" (which is this).

When one party in a 'relationship' behaves in an increasingly dysfunctional manner, healthy corrective behavior by the dysfunctional party's acquaintances becomes sharper and sharper until it resembles "throwing bricks through the window" to outsiders without historical context.

For example, parents can justifiably kick one of their kids out of their house if that kid is dealing drugs from the parent's house or something similarly extreme.

Thats the kind of situation investors are looking at with Uber. From the "benign" lawbreaking we consider disruption they've moved on to attempts to silence and intimidate journalists, and now a self destructive culture where the strong are preying on the vulnerable inside the company.

That can completely destroy an investment!

Shareholders are well within their rights to take an "antagonistic" stance with respect to companies whose values disappoint. We need more shareholders like this, not fewer.

Minority shareholders writing angry public letters happens more than you think. It's just that normally it doesn't make it outside the financial news.

In public companies, absolutely (and in public companies, it is often the right course of action.). By investors in private closely held companies, no.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com