[codewright]

More likely this is a build-up of many offenses, like Pincus' past threatening to fire employees if they didn't surrender their stock.

Pincus is a scum-bag of the first order and is ruining startup employee confidence in the value of their equity. He's poisoning the well for the rest of us.

Anonymous is silly in their own way, but you shouldn't be so quick to dismiss things or actions you don't understand.

[h123b]

Actually, you don't understand Zynga since you're relying on rumor and hearsay. I've worked as Zynga. Things aren't as black and white as you think they are.

[georgemcbay]

I don't think he has to have worked at Zynga to understand the problem. Zynga is hardly the only one, but they are one of the biggest of the new crop of startups that grew huge and IPOed to the benefit of very few employees.

Back in the "old days", even when you move the "old days" up to include Google's IPO, a company with such a massive liquidity event could be expected to result in a lot of wealth spread out among early employees. Even receptionists, chefs, etc could cash out big paydays.

With the way things are now, companies are often structured such that unless you're a founder with an ironclad paper trail of equity ownership, you probably aren't going to be walking away with much more money than what you'd get from a particularly good yearly bonus at a large company, and that's absolutely best-case. More likely is that a liquidity event will occur where nobody but preferred stock owners will see a single dime.

This perception is absolutely a problem for the overall startup ecosystem and plays into why everyone involved wants to be a founder and not just an early employee and this in turn plays into why all these startups all these founders are founding are having massive problems hiring non-founder employees.

As a potential startup employee, your biggest concern shouldn't be whether the company fails spectacularly. Failure sucks, but that's easy enough to get past psychologically. Your biggest concern should be what if the company is extremely successful and you get screwed anyway. Because while this is statistically less likely than spectacular failure, it is much harder to deal with and more common than a lot of people think.

[nextstep]

>you shouldn't be so quick to dismiss things or actions you don't understand.

Instead you should offer more speculation on top of what You don't understand?

[rhizome]

Which part of his response was speculation, that Zynga is poisoned from the top?

[JohnHaugeland]

Mob vigilante acts are not excusable. Not even if you dislike Pincus.