I think like most people who sell their business then see it multiply in size and value afterwards, hindsight is a bitch - he regrets it. He was tortured for years thinking about 'what if' he hadn't sold the company and been in control of its destiny. Rather than appreciating the position he's in, which is probably what he should be doing.
If he was so principled, he shouldn't have sold his business to a company who's principles are exact opposite of those of his own. And then be sour when they provide liquidity of said business, unable to prove his ideas, and then attacking the company afterwards.
It's obviously good he found a place where his own principles are more inline with the company.
He might not be smart enough to run his company. But I've seen more than a few people who aren't smart enough to run a company, but are lucky enough to hit payday.
Sadly, this sort of failing upwards just reinforces their world view.
It's likely that they believe that even experience running a business into the ground is better than no experience at that level at all. It's possible that they don't even blame him for the failures and just chuck it up to the market.
There are a lot of people out there who inherited a family business and failed, It's never easy to grow a business whether you inherited it or started from scratch. He took his business from 3 to 60 million dollars, I don't think that's easy.
Well, for one, he's not that kind of entrepreneur. He made his fortune by starting off extremely wealthy, and then expanded it by defrauding people and going deeply into debt, rather than producing anything of value.
He was described as "a fragile individual, with no particular genius who was facing family problems." That describes the majority of people I know! Somehow though he weaseled his way into the center of operations.
The big question is was it incompetence (i.e. doubling down to cover earlier losses) or was it sabotage. The press says it was not for personal gain. He made a salary under 150K USD.
If he really knew how to make money the stock would have performed better. Perhaps he knew how to make money in some industries, and lose money in others.
> but what he REALLY didn't know was about the operations of a building and the cost of the corner he wanted to end up on. That fucked him from the jump.
However, his family investor 'with nearly a decade in the biz' should have known this stuff from the outset. The same goes for the lopsided income vs outgo. Was that investor just not worth it? Was their advice ignored?
I think the interesting point is that he already had a lot of money, and was perfectly capable of handling it. But when the money was handed to him (rather than earned) he went off the rails.
I'm not qualified to say whether that is a known psychological reaction, but it would seem relevant to the startup world.
When you don't know how to run a business, cut costs and call the result a profit. Then take the bonus for "hitting the target", and pull the golden parachute ripcord.
The boss was pretty smart in the sense of knowing how to work with big corporations to build large decision support systems. But his technical knowledge was fairly shallow.
I sold my first company and the investors did very well, but I made tons of stupid mistakes in the process. Not least of which was holding on to dotcom stock that I thought would go to the moon but which mostly went down the drain.
Was this an obvious consequence at the time? I think he took a big risk and it paid off. Props to him! It could have just as easily tanked his company as a result of an economic downturn.
Maybe he did it because he's not very smart?
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