It sounds unusual for a seed-stage company (I assume that’s what you mean) to seek funding from private equity. Did the company already have significant revenue and profitability? Why did the founder go for private equity rather than VC.. was the founder basically looking to sell/exit at that point?

Yeah exactly - it was essentially at the revenue of series B or C at that point. This is in 2021 during the height of ZIRP, so I assume part of it was frothiness but the aftermath was terrible.

The Age of Inhumanity... AI mimicry of human patterns devalues our very humanity. Without wise leadership, which we clearly lack, this upcoming Age will be profoundly unstable.

Awesome. Best rant I’ve read since Zed Shaw’s “Rails is a Ghetto” back in 2008.

This risk of losing business in the EU due to regulations around data is also acknowledged by google in their recent filing.. this isn’t specific to Meta despite all the articles that have popped up about it… https://twitter.com/SMalikjo/status/1490938883760033792?s=20...

Their Q4 earnings had some conservative projections and higher expenses due to investments in building out their VR teams, and this was enough of a catalyst that the short sellers were able to create a panic.

Fine to hate the company and management, and their politics, but following the money, this seems to be a wildly successful effort to manipulate sentiment and cause retail investors to panic and benefit short sellers in the market. There’s huge money to be made by hedge funds in shorting Meta on the way down, and then buying it again on the way up.

Or maybe they’re really going down to $0 … which is more likely?

> Common saying: "go fast alone, go farther together"

Great advice.

Are you the CEO? And does your vesting agreement have any provision for accelerated vesting if your employment is terminated without cause?

I've found that it's a good way to restrict access to testing/staging/dev environments. way easier to set up and manage than a vpn imo.

Totally! We've seen some nightmare configurations around separating dev/staging/prod environments involving scripts to change /etc/hosts back and forth and some funky VPN configurations.

This is such a common use case that we wrote up a brief description of how to approach this: https://docs.twingate.com/docs/access-control-for-staging-en...

It's not paranoia. An ex-Amazon manager told me fairly recently that they look at customer performance data (trends etc) when evaluating future business opportunities.

So once you start getting traction and customers, there's some internal product manager evaluating whether it's worth entering your market.

I highly doubt this. It would be extremely careless by Amazon to jeopardize their insanely-successful, industry-leading profit-machine with something so reckless.

I didn't even think this was debateable any longer. It absolutely happens on their retail side.

I don't think anyone will have a confirmed example of it happening to AWS customers - but if they are completely willing to destroy smaller vendors on the retail side with their own branded products, I can't imagine them saying AWS is where they draw the ethics line in the sand.

You could make a case for Netflix being an example on the AWS side, but I'd bet more on coincidence.

Amazon would be amazingly and utterly stupid if they were not analyzing their AWS service usage/traffic/spends by market vertical, and I'd imagine must more granular than that. That's simply to sell to people. It's not much of a leap to start using that data to direct internal development and identify unexpected areas of growth.

You are correct. They ABSOLUTELY monitor customer spend usage, without using one iota of personally identifiable information.

Just like it would be careless if the telecoms started sending your web traffic to governments. Or how careless it would be if Google started snooping into your email. Or how careless it would be if phone companies let someone else listen in on your calls and texts.

It's a good thing those never happened either.

It is undeniably terrible, But welcome to fortune 500 business practices. In this world you are seen as weak if you DONT do these things.

Hire an attorney (or several) for a couple of hours to read through your agreements.

The shareholders agreement, even if 'boilerplate', may only give the company the right of first refusal on the sale of shares. Even if unauthorized sales are completely disallowed, if you find an interested buyer there are still ways to craft a legal agreement where you for all practical purposes have 'sold' the shares.

But if the company isn't very successful, there may not be any investor interest, which would make the legal details pretty irrelevant.

I'd recommend getting an attorney to read over your agreements, and also try and gauge investor interest by listing your shares on one of the secondary market marketplaces.

I can relate... I'm not sure it helps, but what you're going through is not uncommon for startup founders.

I know someone who just came out of a job where he was hired to take over most of the day-to-day for a founder in a similar situation. It might be useful to discuss the situation and see what recommendations he has. Feel free to connect via Linkedin and I can put you in touch.