The Way Of The Valley

from the follow-the-money dept

If you've been around Silicon Valley long enough, you've heard the stories of which companies screwed which founders out of what cash. It's happened plenty of times, though there's always the other side of the story, which never gets much attention. However, it should never come as a surprise around here. In some ways, then, it's amusing that the founders and early employees of Epinions are now whining that they got cheated out of their millions from the Shopping.com IPO last week. Shopping.com, of course, was formed by the merger of DealTime and Epinions -- but that merger wiped out most of the stock option value for early Epinions employees. What's amusing about this case, was that when Epinions was formed, in 1999, it was heralded as the new model of startups. It was, after all, "the second generation startup" -- founded by a team of folks who had all come from previous hot startups, and believed they could recreate the magic at a new one, doing it much, much faster. Of course, the world caught up to them and taught them that it takes more than a bunch of folks who have done it before to build a successful company. So, for all that "experience" that went into making this second generation startup, no one ever learned some of the more important lessons of Silicon Valley -- especially the one about counting your cash too early.
Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  • identicon
    dorpus, 1 Nov 2004 @ 12:17am

    Such a shame

    Seems the IT field is incapable of overcoming this attitude that since technology changes fast, morals are irrelevant.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.