Snopes.com prevails in tentative court ruling over finances, ownership
sandiegouniontribune.com
sandiegouniontribune.com
EDIT: To clarify, I'm not saying this is the scenario here (AFAIK there are no VCs involved either); as matthewmacleod put it, "this made me think about divorce generally" -- or more precisely, this is something I've wondered about for a while and this seemed like an opportune time to satisfy my curiosity.
For example, you get the business and the condo, then your husband gets the house and the yacht.
Since both you and another comment so quickly zero in on the divorce aspect in this story, it's worth pointing out that Barbara Mikkelson was, in fact, a proper co-founder when snopes.com started, and worked alongside her husband for 20 years.
This situation is no different than any other founder leaving the company and selling his stakes. HN will have to find another way to blame this on women.
And, yes, there are mechanisms to prevent such problems. First among them would be the right-of-last-refusal: Before you sell, you have to offer the stock to the other co-founder(s), at the exact same terms you're offered. But that's not automatic, and has to be established early on.
It seems like you're the one assuming it'd be a given that the woman didn't contribute. Nobody else said anything about them.
It is valid to ask if this shift from talking about the actual story to talking about invented hypotheticals, and hinting at the danger a spouse might pose to one's company, would have been as quick or as easy or as likely had the spouse in question been male.
And the reason that people always "bring gender into it" or in other cases always "bring race into it" is simple: although to you it may seem that these factors are completely unrelated, to other people the whole experience of their lives is of gender/race being forced on them as a factor. The lack of that experience on the part of a minority of the population (white men, mostly) is not equivalent to gender/race not already being "brought into it", but rather an indicator of the ways in which biases and double standards, once deeply-enough embedded into a society, cease to be seen as such and instead are assumed to just be the default neutral state of affairs.
Nobody is under any obligation to discuss that aspect of the story. It's not even what the story was about.
> shift from talking about the actual story to talking about invented hypotheticals
You're not the Discussion Police nor are you the arbiter of the actual topic of the story.
This is starting to border on thought crime, and I think it's incredibly dangerous.
I think you’re letting your own bias leak here where you implicitly assume all founders are male and their spouses female :)
That’s a glib way for me to make the point, but it does feel like you are jumping to conclusions. I would argue that divorce-related acrimony between founders is still at least somewhat interesting, in the sense that it’s a valid question whether or not there are standard ways to avoid problems in such complex and unpleasant situations as divorce. No matter the gender of the people involved!
All founders' spouses had to sign. It's basically an extremely focused post nup.
Yes. Don't invest.
With the rise in land prices many farmers are now using them to ensure that a divorce doesn't result in having to sell a family farm that's been in the family for generations.
It doesn't have to be an adversarial process, and you need to make sure the other party is properly compensated, this compensation often comes from the firm/company/farm that is requiring the pre/post nup.
Now, if both parties are founders in the enterprise then it can be tricky if they both still want to run the company, in which case, I don't know how that could possibly be settled in a way that would make either party happy other than the pizza solution, one side names a price and the other side gets to decide to buy or sell.
Prenups could be tossed in court unless both parties had their own lawyers paid by them individually.
Incidentally, this means that depending on the property law in your state, your share might be halved in event of divorce, and your spouse gets a nice paycheck.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170731/11351837890/fact-...
S Corps are treated as partnerships for tax purposes. Proper Media, an LLC, wanted to buy out Barbara's stake. LLCs are not permitted to be shareholders in an S Corp so instead of selling her stake to Proper Media, Barbara split it up among the members (i.e. the owners) of Proper Media.
If a competent lawyer had done this deal, they would have created a trust to re-consolidate Barbara's stake with the owners of Proper Media as beneficiaries and Schoentrup alone or Schoentrup and Richmond as the trustees.
I know this because I am not a lawyer, I'm not even American, and it took me only a few minutes to figure out that:
(a) trusts may own shares in an S Corp so long as the beneficiaries meet the requirements to be an S Corp shareholder (b) trusts are permitted to own shares in an S Corp for the purpose of consolidating a stake in the corporation (i.e. voting rights)
I'm not really sure that anyone can own shares in an S Corp for the benefit of an LLC since that would create a trust whose beneficiary does not meet the requirements to be a shareholder in an S Corp. So Proper Media really has no standing to sue Bardav nor Mikkelson. This should be a minority shareholders vs majority shareholders lawsuit and rather easily resolved that way.
Most people have prenups to handle this sort of situation.
Kind of strange how up until 2016 they just did urban legends, myths, chain letters, scams, etc. Then took on political fact checking in 2016 and by 2017 they divorce after Snoops is picked by Facebook as one of the offical fact checkers.
I was given a link by one of my friends and posted it on my brothers timeline as it was about vaping and side effects, but a day or two later it was flagged as fake news and censored and I was not given a link for explination. I kind of hoped for a link to an article as to why it was fake news and how they debunked it.
It's a complex problem though. Even after 30 years or so of carefully nothing 'how things go wrong' there still appears to be an infinite supply of new reasons how things go wrong.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4042194/Facebook-fac...
Very true, but then there's divorce, that perennial cause of problems.