[NotPavlovsDog]

The real lesson is,and been for a while, if you do a start-up, do like Zuckerberg and The Google boys. If you want your company to stay your company, watch that vital stock and keep the majority votes.

Zuckerberg:

“So one of the things that I’ve been lucky about in building this company is ... I kind of have voting control of the company, and that’s something I focused on early on. And it was important because, without that, there were several points where I would’ve been fired. For sure, for sure,”

Source: The Verge

[mdavis6890]

In the vast majority of cases this will preclude you from getting investment money. Sure - some companies can get away with that, but not a lot of them.

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

It’s normal to give up, what, 10% a round? That means you can afford to give up voting rights on the first few rounds. If you have a strong enough trajectory at that point you may be in a position to make demands to keep more voting power.

[dcolkitt]

Counterpoint: Other investors have as much incentive to maximize the value of the company as I do. Besides ego, why should I care if someone is brought in who can do a better job. I still get to keep all my shares, and don’t even have to show up to work anymore.

[azinman2]

> I still get to keep all my shares

That often isn’t the case. I personally know of situations where CEOs were pushed out and recapped to effectively little.

[NotPavlovsDog]

Zuck in the Verge article discussed how much pressure there was to sell to Yahoo for 1B. For an average start-up, it might be being pushed to sell for, say, someM when you could wait and chance on 10xsomeM if you had the votes.