In Facebook Deal, Board Was All But Out of Picture(online.wsj.com) |
In Facebook Deal, Board Was All But Out of Picture(online.wsj.com) |
There's plenty of extremely talented people who joined the party too late to have any significant options. Now everywhere they go (including home, private, and social lives...) they can't escape hearing about the gold mine that was just dropped on Kevin and crew.
You literally can't escape this news in the connected world. Can't help but wonder if that's weighing on morale at all in there.
Same thing that let him say no to his own $1 billion acquisition offer I suppose.
Though Google cache pulled through, at least for now:
People laughed at Google for buying YouTube for $1.65 billion. Now every single big company wishes they had done it instead.
I think it was Sergey Brin who recently said something about an investment in Google being a long-term bet on his/Page's decision making. It's like the world has suddenly forgotten why businesses are structured the way they are.
To make an unrelated, more controversial, point: if a CEO can take arbitrary, unilateral decisions, it's difficult to see why they should benefit from the protection of corporate liability.
So this started before the deal was closed. Did the funding round close?
funny that they would only need to let their investment ride into equivalent investments for another 21 days before reaching a return of 209 Trillion dollars, which is in excess of the total value of all stocks, bonds and currency in the world.
[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%3D+%281+billion+-+500+...
(PS: Negotiation 101, start with a number 2x bigger than what you expect)
There's nothing "arbitrary" about his decision to buy Instagram. And the fact that he makes decisions like this shouldn't be any more cause for concern then the fact that he makes decisions about whether to buy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of servers, hire 5000 more employees, or whatever.
The board is there to advise and prevent malfeasance -- not to run the company.
Complaining about how some of the most successful companies in history are run (Google/Facbook/Apple/Microsoft) is rather odd. Do you really think their shareholders would be better served with boards like HP's?
In this case it's worth noting that the CEO is also the largest shareholder, so it is difficult to argue they weren't representing shareholder interest.
One other note - for the first five years of a fund (typically), the 2 percent fee is calculated on committed capital not invested capital, so an event like this has no impact.
To implement First Click Free, you need to allow all users who find a document on your site via Google search to see the full text of that document, even if they have not registered or subscribed to see that content. The user's first click to your content area is free. However, once that user clicks a link on the original page, you can require them to sign in or register to read further.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=au&tbm=nws...
try running the search manually yourself.
I had a feature in on of my chrome extension that would do this automatically but it was too flaky to release - but I did find that referrals from the news site worked most of the time.