[staunch]

Don't you see how that defies the notion that it was a pump and dump? Why would they (with tens of millions of dollars) stick around?

No one can force them to stay. They're already obscenely rich. Think about what their motivations must be.

[tptacek]

As I noted above, this isn't really an argument. Sanjay Kumar made hundreds of millions of dollars from CA and could have left long before he was indicted having already ensured that none of his grandchildren would ever have to work a day in their lives.

[staunch]

If you think they're sticking around to make more money, then they must be trying to repair the company's stock price. Or you think they're still there out of a sense of pride or guilt.

Either way it's not a pump and dump, and their goal is to turn the company around.

[sirclueless]

The only thing their continued presence at their respective companies tells us is that they think they can do better by staying than leaving. Mark Pincus might be staying at Zynga because he thinks he can turn around the stock price and make it a sustainable company, or he might be staying because he thinks there is plenty of profit to squeeze out of the company as it dies. There are reasons to stick around besides goodwill towards the company.

[staunch]

He's got $200M and no one can take his massive equity away. I just think you have to be very cynical to think his primary motivation is money, at this point.

[khafra]

I think you have to be pretty silly to think that people, in general, stop being motivated by money once they get a lot of money. The only two high net worth individuals I can think of who obviously stopped being motivated by money are Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.

[corford]

These guys obviously aren't the sort of people that are happy to lie by the beach reading a book, quietly enjoying their millions.

They're alpha dogs in the absolute worst sense of the word. They thrive off ego, winning, power, greed, narcissism and all those other lovely traits most people pulling similar moves seem to have.

Think Gordon Geko. Remove the pin stripe suit, fast forward 30 years and change the modus operandi from cynical asset stripping to cynical stock hyping and you get...

Edit: a more charitable view, in Pincus' case, is he isn't THAT evil and instead simply made a hugely expensive mistake buying OMGPOP. That wrecked the balance sheet and he's holding in there trying to recover.

[9999]

That thing that you said there does not describe Andrew Mason in any way shape or form. He used to post on a forum that I spent a lot of time on in the early 00s. He's a clever, funny guy, and he took most of his lessons in ethics from Steve Albini. Before Groupon, he created The Point which was a group funding site for social initiatives that in many ways resembled Kickstarter.

[ahi]

Maybe not Mason, but it seems like a reasonable assessment of Lefkofsky.

[tesseractive]

This. You could believe that Mason was acting in a completely earnest fashion, but was too naive to realize he was being manipulated by Lefkofsky.

As Excutive Chairman in a non-operational role, Lefkofsky is under only a fraction of the unpleasant pressure Mason is under as CEO. If he were guilty of behaving in this way, that would actually jibe pretty well with pg's assertion about people not wanting to run struggling public companies if they can avoid it.

Personally, I am no expert on Groupon. I make no claims that Lefkofsky has behaved in that way, because I don't have any evidence to either validate or invalidate such a hypothesis. It's simply not clear to me that such an accusation is obviously false, as pg claims.

[yuhong]

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4284524 http://pandodaily.com/2012/06/04/source-lefkofsky-and-samwer...

[corford]

I'm happy to stand corrected on Andrew Mason since I don't know an awful lot about him. But as others have said, Lefkofsky definitely appears to fit the profile.

[ahi]

Not really. There's still money on the table so they are still playing.