Now how about something about their relationship with the venture capitalist, Gustavo Fring? The efforts they had to go to in order to convince him that they were personally trustworthy, his nefarious plans to steal their IP and put them out of business, etc?
CEO would disappear for months at a time, with the promise of returning with capital. We never really knew where he went, and he wouldn’t let anyone else talk to investors (including me, who was CTO). Eventually he stopped paying us, but promised that the money was just tied up in the parent company set up in the caymans.
After 2 months of not paying myself or any other employees, the COO and I drainked the remainder of the US account and paid out as much of what was owed as we could to the employees before helping them find jobs elsewhere. I didn’t get any of the money I was owed and was facing pretty bad debt, but the experience was enough of a resume boost that I didn’t have a problem making it up in my signing bonus.
What I learned is that a title doesn’t grant you any control, and that if someone can’t be transparent with their inner circle of friends and colleagues (in this case cofounders), then they have no business leading a company.
It sure is interesting how they extended their tentacles into as many other companies and projects as possible (SBF even approached Elon about financing the Twitter acquisition) while knowing they were financing these deals with customer deposits, before blowing it up in the most spectacular way possible…
I can’t imagine a series of actions that would be more destructive to the industry. The actions don’t make sense unless they were taken to maximize the potential fallout.
The deep regulatory and political connections are also interesting…
A comment below tickled my interest and I did some quick googling. From the information available on the web, it looks like your comment makes what happened look much worse than the reality.
So I just want to point out to others that this is one side of the story and it lacks a lot of details to draw any conclusion and ask for the names of the "guilty".
edit: since I'm getting some downvotes, let me expand a bit: it looks like said-company wasn't going anywhere, that fourk didn't work there for very long, that the founders ended up being hired by Google, and it's not clear that the company itself was really bought. So, and again I don't have the whole story either, it's not as clear-cut as "execs and investors made millions and completely screwed a key employee out of his due".
I thought of adding them to my list but I wasn't familiar enough with the story. I do recall something about an implosion happening though. Oh yeah, and the pyramid scam / forced suppliers thing.
I get the sense that a big part of the story didn't get told here. For instance, how did those guys get the financing to buyout the Enron stuff? Where are the investors coming from -- locally, inside-the-company, etc.
I'd also like to hear how a relatively small startup pulled down some big international players. Getting business from local investor-types is one thing: loading up with huge DoD sensitive stuff isn't something you just wake up one day and do.
My best one to date: In early 2002 we got an offer of a well-funded start-up to take over our company. We had the technology, they had the sales, the marketing and the $.
The CEO met me in an office in SV so lavish it would not have been out of place as a Ferrari showroom. Halfway during the meeting - we didn't hit it off all that well - he made the momentous announcement that if we did not accept his offer we'd be going on a head-on collision course for a game of chicken and he had just thrown away his steering wheel.
I just laughed, bade my farewells. They failed spectacularly (not a bankruptcy but the service was shut down) several months later after burning through a very large fraction of $30M.
What puzzles me to this date is what he thought he was trying to accomplish by showing me that he was a reckless cowboy with very little sense for business relations but it certainly wasn't going to end in a partnership with him 'at the wheel' (since he'd just thrown that out).
I have all kinds of theories about what actually happened. All I really know for sure, is that a bunch of wild accusations were thrown around at the execs by a small clique of powerful investors, with new accusations being generated as old ones failed to stick. Then the execs were fired for unmentioned reasons and sworn to silence, with the threat that no employees would be paid if anyone broke silence or failed to follow the orders of the interim CEO (total stranger).
This all happened over a single weekend. Considering that we were in a monarchy, and some of investors were royalty, I took that as my cue to get the F out of Dodge before my passport got locked. It took me a while to recover from the stress and the trauma; not knowing what ever happened makes it hard to put it behind me.
Even now, I am afraid to share too much detail, because I am unsure of how that would affect the people who remained in the country. Always have an emergency exit ready to go; $5K in cash will get you across most borders, if you play your cards right.
I def feel for the guy and how he basically got years of his life ruined by a big player, but him and his family did some pretty shady stuff with regards to the company computers and data.
I viewed it as a story in how a great CEO realized that he needed to personally step in to drive and protect a program that could cannibalize their existing business. Similar story to Netflix’s video streaming over the CDs.
This should be a film, the story has everything: business press coverage, the BluRay code event, death threats to the founder, a near-deal with Google, the exit of the CEO, the 4.0 debacle, the company downsizes, the founder leaves, the company struggles, then the company sells it's shell.
They had a duty to shareholders which they broke when they abused their position of trust within the company to hurt those shareholders by stealing information from the company and using it for personal gain.
The history of the company has been used as an academic case study in the study of corporate governance and ethics[14] and also as the subject in 2019 National Geographic's docudrama miniseries Valley of the Boom.
reply