Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

You are referring to the $62 million judgement from 30 years ago that the government had issues collecting due to the bankruptcy and trusts?

Hm

My thoughts on that are “hostile corporate takeovers” are completely drama free “Mergers & Acquisitions” now, compared to when they were novel in the 1980s, they perturb no-one and nowadays founders do not start acquirable companies to get married to their company, they start companies to sell the shares they created at a cost basis of $0.00 for billions of dollars. So that specific money would have never had zealous prosecutors looking, and subsequent Supreme Court cases would have made the whole judgement invalid, if there was any due process path remaining for addressing old judgements. But okay, I can play along with the idea that he owes the government what is asked. Which moves me to my next point:

You dont think billions of new money could have been made over the last 30 years that had nothing to do with the 1980s M&A activity?

People that understand capital markets don't just have 1 idea lucrative their whole life.

Its odd to assume its related money, forever.

One factor here may be that due to Sarbanes-Oxley companies aren’t IPOing at small market caps anymore.

Sadly, and they should go public earlier.

I’m not sure how that dictates the change in founder behavior. Unless you mean that it self selects for moonshot founders who don't conflate their business and passions - or founders that form businesses for exits, than the business.

Do you think if smaller companies were publicly traded more often that there would be headline grabbing poison pill discussions? Small companies getting tricked into buying up their own shares at a premium to fend off a large shareholder’s takeover bid - and people calling the large shareholder’s failed takeover a trick, theft, controversial at all?

I really just think the culture has changed and all of this has been normalized. Nobody is incorporating in irrelevant states anymore for protections against takeovers, the entire universe of eligible businesses is in Delaware now.

So many things are different in the minds of individual humans involved that none of this would be controversial.

The culture may have changed, but the way I meant was first, with small IPOs is that the founders may expect exponential growth post-IPO, and that gets cut short, and second, it’s much easier to hostile takeover small companies. Whether it’s Amazon or Dunkin Donuts. Instead the company’s older, founders are more tired, the payout’s higher, and (I assume) being more expensive, they’re less common.

I would guess companies now keep voting power among insiders after IPO with special share classes instead of incorporating in odd states, if they’re inclined to avoid a takeover.

When it comes to the modern day version of this sort of drama, the first thing that comes to mind is pre-exit startup founders losing control. That’s still a thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com