Comment by ubermonkey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ubermonkey | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>Good founders that know they’re not the right ones to lead the next phase of the business know when to step aside.

The problem is that now we have the Facebook/Zuckerberg example, wherein the founder managed to take outside money, and even go public, while still protecting his absolutely control of the company.

As with most public firms, each Class A share owned gives you one vote. However, Meta also has Class B shares that give the owner TEN votes each -- and Zuck owns a simple majority of those Class B shares. His voting power means he can do whatever he wants regardless of what the Class A shareholders want. (Zuck is also both CEO and Chair of the board.)

https://www.morningstar.com/sustainable-investing/how-facebo...

This structure is weird, but not unique. The end result is that Zuck got to have his cake (public money) and eat it to (keep absolutely control).

Zuck should be seen as the exception not the rule, he is demonstrably much smarter than your average CEO or even your average SV founder. Yea he's a robot, but while that may make him less likable among the general public he still is able to show enough "EQ" to his team and investors to keep them happy.

Everyone thinks they can replicate his success because they too are smart and have a great idea, but most really aren't as smart as him and he really lucked out with the timing, SV funding was still young enough that he was able to get away with things that would never fly today.

> he still is able to show enough "EQ" to his team and investors to keep them happy.

He was really good at hiring (and listening to) people who were better than him at lots of other things. Sheryl Sandberg in particular is probably more responsible for FB's success than anyone except him.

He also retained a ridiculously large proportion of those early folks, who could tell him he was being dumb. He's basically lost almost all of them in the past 3-5 years (to be fair, they were all billionaires so he did well to retain them for as long as he did), so we'll have to see how the next 5-10 years work out.

As I said there are exceptions, but most founders should not expect to be able to create similar scenarios. If you walk into the office of a VC in the present market and say I want your money but I want to keep full control, that meeting is not going to go well.

What's more interesting to me is that, so far, this strategy has worked fairly well for him and the other shareholders.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com