charlesdm

Worked in the game industry after university for about a year. It's great until you realise you're basically building overall above average technology in terms of difficulty, yet being paid a fraction of an engineer at Google. I quit and set up my own business.

Cool website, however, I really dislike the name. Doesn't make much sense to me.

Ah, but Alibaba...

I think they also bought common stock?

During private fundraising, investor (vs founder) stock generally has preferred rights when the company is sold and/or liquidated. There might also be restrictions on who and how someone can sell their common shares. This depends on the investors and the terms that were negotiated during fundraising.

So common stock generally is sold at a discount because it doesn't have any of these protections, and it's basically last in line to receive any payout.

However during IPO, often preferred stock converts into normal common stock so that it can be sold to Joe Smuck (or their pension fund institutional) investor.

Hence it's an arbitrage play; you purchase common at say a 30% discount in a late round and then sell it on the market for full price.

Unless Softbank is willing to lend said money unsecured to a limited liability SPV without a personal guarantee. I can't imagine that all these people are taking on personal debt to invest in the vision fund.

Don't you pay tax when you actually get the equity? How is it different to getting cash and then just buying the stock?

So how should a CEO be compensated then, if you're so sure the answer here is no instead of yes?

Clearly not someone who thinks in terms of value creation.

If I can add $20m of profit to the bottom line of an organisation, then there is nothing wrong with capturing some of that value, no?

Call it CEO or entrepreneur, at the end of the day, it's the same job, with the same end result.

You're basically saying good investors don't exist and everything is priced to perfection? This could range from investing in equipment, to expanding in a new business line, to acquiring a competitor and realising synergies that someone else would not have noticed. Putting 1 and 1 together in specific business focus areas might result in 3 for the well trained eye or the smart mind.

Plenty of people are good at investing (understanding how it all ties together, and understanding how they take risk) outside of the public markets. And plenty are horrible (i.e. mom and pop investing in the mutual funds of your bank).

And generally the shareholder(s).. ?

The short answer to that question is yes. A good CEO will invest $200 million in a good asset (i.e. factory), resulting in a great return for the organisation. A bad CEO will invest $200 million in a bad asset (i.e. Tumblr, $1.1bn -> $3m) and lose their shirt.

Say the decision of the good CEO makes the company $100m. How much is he worth? A lot.

As someone with plenty of C++ knowledge on mobile, I would expect there to be more C++ devs available with good mobile skills than there are rust devs?

Maybe my own viewpoint is twisting the amount of devs I think are available, but I don't think the choice dropbox originally made was crazy. C++ is a great way to share complex code over multiple platforms (i.e. desktop + mobile) if you're running a relatively small engineering team with limited resources.

Now, if you have semi unlimited resources, it makes sense to rebuild things natively for each platform in many cases. But Dropbox might not have been around, had they not maken the choice to share part of their codebase cross platforms.

An "emergency freeze" of moneys that were raised in 2017 and 2018...

On Aug. 12, 2019, the court entered an emergency freeze to preserve at least $8 million of the $14.8 million the defendants raised in 2017 and 2018 in an offering of digital securities."

I'd rather pay more and have a safe taxi ride, over a dirt cheap and unsafe taxi ride...

So the question is, assuming you have a valid exploit, could you not convince Apple to pay more than $1m?

If you found an unfound gaping crater of an exploit somewhere -- how much would that be worth to them? Likely a lot more than $1m. I'm sure you could negotiate that number up, a lot.

That is a completely different line of business, though.

Prince Malchezaar should have the answer

For sure they suck. But who has time to go shopping if you're in town for a day? Most people prefer room service (if busy) and breakfast the day after. I love Airbnb but just don't use it for business travel.

Sorry, I missed that -- cheers!

This is exactly why I just renewed my personal domain for 10 years!

Would you mind sharing how much they actually wanted for it?

Are we talking 9 years of waiting, vs $500, or 9 years of waiting, vs $10,000?

Regardless, congrats on getting it back.

Maybe, but LBOs also offer a way for shareholders to exit. Unless you can sell to a strategic acquirer (which could also be PE, but usually not) there are not a lot of exit options. And who is going to acquire a business just with equity?

People don't want to run businesses for ever. Private equity allows them to, in some cases. An unmotivated entrepreneur who is only doing a half assed job after a while will also cause a company to go bankrupt. Better to sell then.

Banks generally have sufficient collateral (i.e. from the acquired business) to cover the outstanding principal in the event of a bankruptcy.

Who? Easy: banks. Bank debt generally has first call in the event of a liquidation, so if everything goes to hell the assets will be liquidated and banks will be the first to be paid back. They likely don't end up losing a lot, if anything at all.

The article makes it seem super obvious that these deals won't work out. But that is actually not the case. Many / most PE deals actually do work out, and end up making the sponsors a lot of money.

And why would banks allow this? Because private equity are huge profit drivers. They use lots of debt. They also acquire many companies, so there is an ongoing relationship.

It all depends on the amounts being moved. Transfer pricing is complex because what is market rate in situation A is not market rate in situation B. $345 million could be a minor difference of a few percentage points on tens of billions in revenue.

Just like FDSGSG wrote above, I went through a sizeable tax dispute (for an individual, outside of the US) and won. I have a good understanding of tax law yet it was nothing more than a bullshit money grab. No merit, nothing. More along the line; that's a very nice outcome for you but we don't really like it -- so pay up regardless. Like trying to shake a tree.

In this case, I can imagine for Activision (as a publicly traded company) it is better to settle a case for an OK amount than take it to court and run through the process. You have to make a risk reward analysis of whether it's worth spending time and resources on.

They're first to embrace technology, because digital money is money that can be tracked. So the tax "take" will be higher with digital money than with cash. High tax countries have all the incentives to go digital as soon as possible.

I highly doubt that in all honesty. But it's good to think positive!

Because it can go down in value. Plus purchase and annual taxes.

But yes, mostly correct. I don't really see rates rising in a long time.

> In extremis you can sometimes walk in if a restaurant isn't busy, ask for a glass of water, drink it while standing, and leave immediately. You would never sit in such a circumstance

Perhaps I'm not used to it, but that sounds extremely silly and rude to me?

I'm Belgian so I'm aware we don't really drink tap water. However, to say that tap water tastes exactly the same as bottled water is also a bit ridiculous in my mind.

At the end of the day I guess it comes down to preference. Perhaps a silly question, but why do you go for tap water? Just because of the waste issue? And a second question, why would tap water have to be free and would you pay for it?

PS: Cool business! Are you in Belgium?

I never got why people are so into free tap water everywhere. Who goes into a restaurant, does not order anything, and asks for free ice water?

If I'm a restaurant owner and someone is taking up a seat while drinking free tap water, of course I'm not going to like that.