Founders could either get paid through secondary as well or through new employment agreements. Secondary is much more tax efficient, otherwise it doesn't really matter
i thought so at first, but I did some digging and changed my mind. it's possible the following is how it goes:
- secondary transaction with the preferred shareholders (VCs) at some price that implies a 20b valuation
- founders quit and get new employment agreements
- some cash is transferred to the company as a license fee
- no acquisition means no DOJ approval
in this scenario the headline can be $20b but the cash expense can be much lower, you have full flexibility to direct whatever cash or equity you want to founders vs the rest of the company, as an up front payment or as retention/salary, and the founders have no hinderance from working on anything they touched at previous company because of IP license.
I actually bet this is how it went down. This is becoming the standard in the industry and it's just awful for the future of SV
I don't think you can treat owners of the same shares differently in the way this is suggesting. The VC shareholders and the employee shareholders are probably on equal footing and getting the same price. VCs will own preferred but I doubt that is enough to windfall them at the expense of the common shareholders.
So if VCs are getting paid a certain share price, employees with vested stock almost certainly are getting the same price. And probably employees with vested options can either exercise now or will just get paid the net during the transaction.
Yes, the company is probably doomed so people staying there are not doing well, but they also just got paid a 3x premium on their vested equity.
You can get through to a web server, but that web server uses DNS records or those routes to hit other services necessary to render the page. So the server you hit will also time out eventually and return a 500
It's amusing that the top 3 trending reports are the FB sites that are down, and then the mobile carriers themselves, presumably because when FB doesn't load they assume it's their mobile network's fault. People really do think FB is the internet