Not necessarily. If this guy wrote bad checks, he may well be given an option to make good on it to have his sentence reduced or removed.
A similar thing happened to a guy who scammed me and others. One of the guys who was scammed went to the local cops who took out a warrant. The guy who scammed us was arrested and released almost immediately. He paid the guy through the court and his attorney. I still remain unpaid...and I didn't go to the cops(mostly because nyc cops didn't care much about the case speaking to them on the phone). You can read more here if you're curious: http://cliffkaplanfraud.com/
THANK YOU! I've been a loyal spotify premium member for two years going and it seems like their products are on a DOWNWARD trajectory. The mobile app used to be just fine till they updated with messed up information and ux flow. Depressing!
If I talk with my boards on his misbehaviour it will get them stressed and stop believing on the company
Sorry dude, looks like that is precisely what you are going to have to do. Don't worry about the board stressing; they can handle it. That's their job.
Focus on YOUR job: the success of the company. The board will stop believing you when you prolong this longer than you should have, actually making the situation much worse.
When you go to the board, GO PREPARED. Assume the board does not know anything. And treat it almost like a trial where you will get to present your side, and at some point, your co-founder will get to present his. In these cases, I like to open up a document and put down the facts in bullet points. When presenting, remain calm and stick to the facts, which when evaluated by a sensible party(your board), should have them arrive at the same conclusion as you.
I was in a slightly similar situation (without a board), and I did wait too long to act, and by then it was too late and the only option was to break up the company.
It sucked, and I felt like I had wasted 3 years of my life, and while my co-founder definitely did his own damage by not holding up his end, my biggest personal mistake was to not immediately, and aggressively, deal with the problem when I saw it arise (and after initial cooperative attempts at resolution went nowhere).
If you are putting everything you have into your startup, then you have everything to lose if you let someone else fuck it up for you.
You may in fact be legally obligated to discuss this with the board. I would also give a heads-up to your lawyer about this. If this gets messy, you'll want some ironclad legal protection for the company.
Thanks for the advice. I might go with this one after holiday ends. The only problem I see here is that he has more rapport with them (since I'm more product oriented and he's money oriented).
It's going to get real messy, especially since he holds all money, bank, passwords info (now I understand why he wanted to take control of those stuff in the beginning). Firing him will be so messy, and the 3 employees we have today respect him a lot especially since he's an expert following those rules in the article I stated in the original post (he's even deceived me lot's of times!)
shit.. Sometimes I think I need a new startup problem to solve to leave the company because this is not letting me sleep at night (and it's no longer the first thought when waking up in the morning).
You should enlist a friend or a mentor to help you prepare with this situation. They can come up with tough questions that the board might ask you and make sure that you have a coherent, clear answer. That has helped me tremendously in clarifying my own thoughts.
You should also roleplay with this person as if he is your cofounder. Have him be a dick and make any argument you can see you cofounder make at any point. I've learned that winning arguments and being right are two different things. This way, if your cofounder is good with the former, you need to be prepared and roleplaying will give you a great edge!
Also, write down all possible scenarios. So if the board asks you "what will happen if the employees quit?" you need to have already thought through that use-case. They will probably be very impressed if you have a document that has these use-cases and possible plans.
This is a big red flag. Who hired those people? Why did you agree to hire them if you don't respect their judgement? Or is your co-founder also doing all the hiring as well as taking care of everything else?
Starting to sound like you should be asking yourself what you contribute.
I am seeing this red flag here too. This is sounding a bit ridiculous. It seems to me if the other guy is the money guy and OP is the product guy, and the employees, board, logistics are all in the hand of the money guy, then he is doing precisely his job.
What does OP really want his cofounder to do, maybe its time he explains why is he an 'overrated' person.
In reading that he's the money guy, is he really not holding up his side of things? What's he specifically not doing, that he should be?
It's hard to read between the lines to know if he's really not keeping up his end. Employees like him, he sounds like he's the field expert, he's got the money, he assembled the board, etc...
One thing that helped me in my situation is that I made a document just describing my situation, written from the perspective that it is a business school case study. Then have some friends close to you read it and tell you who they think is at fault. The biggest key is that when writing the story, replace your company name and other names with made up names so people who you ask for feedback aren't biased.
This will give you first line of objective feedback even about your own positions.
> It's going to get real messy, especially since he holds all money, bank, passwords info (now I understand why he wanted to take control of those stuff in the beginning).
You're not kidding. I hope you just mean logistical access (as in, currently holds the details to), as opposed to actually having them in his name. If the latter, you're pretty much screwed. In any case, when you discuss this with the board, once you get them on board with this decision in the first place, you're going to need to make a clear plan for getting access to all of those resources transferred. Hopefully you can do so quickly and without legal action required. Fortunately, if they're in the company name, there are steps you can take to get that access.
I would recommend that anyone else reading this take note: you need someone on the board who is your ally. You can't let your partner fill it with his own people.
It's not going to get real messy unless he wants to go to jail for fraud / theft / embezzlement.
You need to present your case to the board, there is no other good way to go. If they side with you, your co-founder will have no choice but to turn over control of the money, and in fact you should encourage the board to force the point on the money / passwords / etc controls anyway.
I imagine this will get ugly if you just change the passwords and revoke his access. He owns a decent share of the company so my suggestion would be if you want this company. Buy his share and give him the money.
During this period of time you can hire a team (or someone) to secure your companies credentials. Hiring a team to review your assets both physical and virtual; code base and otherwise would be wise.
Right on. I'd use a widget to embed lyrics with audio in every blog post if they made it easy. May be integrate with spotify. And create a Wordpress plugin.
Buggery. It's been illegal many places for a very long time because it spreads disease. The sodomy laws were effectively repealed and we got AIDS. It was not a coincidence.
Sexual intercourse of any kind spreads disease. AIDS didn't become an epidemic because of anal intercourse. It's pretty clear that AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases spread just as well from almost any kind sexual activity, and many of them -- including AIDS -- spread from any transfer of bodily fluids at all.
Going further, I'd wager that any form of interpersonal contact, even non-sexual, is as likely to spread some form of disease. Why not enact a law which requires any person to don a hazmat suit before venturing into public space? Or better yet, a law which forbids any person from entering public space?
It's pretty clear that AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases spread just as well from almost any kind sexual activity, and many of them -- including AIDS -- spread from any transfer of bodily fluids at all.
It's clear that HIV can spread via a wide range of sexual activities, but some are much higher risk than others. At the extremes, receptive anal intercourse has a transmission risk roughly 50 times higher than insertive vaginal intercourse, while the risk of oral sex is believed to be non-zero but too low to be accurately measurable.
Wikipedia gives estimates on differences between anal and vaginal transmission are about 8-1 but also admits the numbers could be off by a factor of 10.
What we know is that the AIDS epidemic was at it's worst in Africa where it was largely spread through heterosexual transmission.
I grew up around the time teens were force-fed sex education regarding AIDS, and the message was loud and clear and consistent: Ordinary sex is a great way to contract HIV. This, in fact, was always a lie--and a coordinated lie--and the scientists knew about it.
the odds of a heterosexual becoming infected with AIDS after one episode of penile-vaginal intercourse with someone in a non-high-risk group without a condom are one in 5 million.
(Sorry for the crummy source, but I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this BS.) The original infections seen by doctors weren't just homosexuals, but those who had sometimes dozens of sexual encounters per week. It was clear from the beginning how this disease was spread--reciprocal anal sex.
So why the contrary propaganda? Well, if a disease primarily effects a small, ultra-promiscuous portion of two percent of the general population, research funding tends to lose popular support.
The risk of being infected with hiv by someone who doesn't carry the virus is obviously very small. Very few people have hiv, so you probably won't be infected if you have sex. That's how I read that quote, anyway. Are you saying that advocating never having sex with the same partner more than once would have been better advice for reducing the spread of STDs?
The unique thing about hiv is the high moortality rate (and cost of treatment). It makes perfect sense to reduce transmission before it becomes a true global epidemic.
Obviously. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the scientists wanting to make sure that widespread HIV infection didn't break out within heterosexual communities - which it could easily have done as we've seen in Africa. If heterosexual people had been taught they didn't need to worry about HIV, we could easily have had similar outbreaks here which would rapidly have made the odds a lot worse. (Also, it's impossible to reliably tell if the person you're having sex with is a member of a high-risk group anyway.)
They used to lock you up for adultery, too, right up to the 60s. Disease was a consideration. So it's not just a matter of targeting gays.
> AIDS didn't become an epidemic because of anal intercourse
Yes it did. This is not remotely controversial. Aids and many other STDs are spread chiefly by buggery. This is why the red cross does not want blood donations from homosexuals.
What they say may seem clear, and yet not reflect what they really believe.
I give blood every two months. As I recall the questionnaire, you can do almost anything imaginable (sex with prostitutes, accidental needle stick, receiving blood transfusion, etc.) and get a one year deferral. But if you are a man who had oral sex with a man one time twenty years ago, that's a permanent "deferral." No science behind this.
A history of male-to-male sex is associated with an
increased risk for exposure to and transmission of certain
infectious diseases, including HIV, the virus that causes
AIDS. Men who have had sex with other men represent
approximately 2% of the US population, yet are the
population
most severely affected by HIV. In 2010, MSM accounted for at
least 61% of all new HIV infections in the U.S. and an
estimated 77% of diagnosed HIV infections among males were
attributed to male-to-male sexual contact.
Looks like science, namely statistics and medicine. If 61% of new HIV infections are coming from MSM then it's higher chances than then other criteria you've listed combined (i.e. non-MSM new HIV infections are only 39%, which is much less than 61%).
Exactly what conclusions do you draw from those stats? Yes, I remember from my mathematics degree that 39<61, but what does that have to do with anything? What groups do you think you are comparing?
(Especially) If a man has not had sex with another man for a year, and has tested clean during that time, the stats you cite do not support excluding him from donation. Again, this is considering that blood transfusions, sex with prostitutes (!!), and accidental needle sticks only earn a twelve-month deferral.
Do you see a stat that says a gay man is more likely to be HIV+ than an active prostitute? Because that seems to be a relevant comparison.
I donate blood to save lives. No blood transfusion is risk-free, but there is also a risk/cost to excluding healthy willing donors of clean blood.
I believe that the above comment is misguided on a number of levels, especially the (assumed) bigoted nature of the writer, but first, note that in New York, one of the major American centers of the HIV/AIDS crisis (with the other being San Francisco), sodomy laws were only repealed by court order in 1980 [1], while AIDS was first clinically observed in America in 1981 [2].
Second, it is widely considered that the spread of HIV (which causes AIDS) was a result of (heterosexual) prostitution. If you look at [2], we see that it was spread extensively by African prostitutes from rural Congo, an almost uniquely heterosexual phenomenon.
LOL, 1980 repeal. The Stonewall riots were in NYC in 1969 and after that the cops stopped busting up gay hookup spots. That's why NYC was a center for AIDS. I'm not saying gay bars should be illegal, but denying the causality is wishful thinking.
Watch "Midnight Cowboy" (1969) and "Cruising" (1980) to get a glimpse into how AIDS came to be.
Unprotected heterosexual sex is considerably more dangerous than male-male sex. It kills considerable more people. Pregnancy has historically been very dangerous, and even now is not without serious health risks.
One would hope in a place like HN one would not find people as bigoted as you are. You must be a very sad person. Lack of sexed allows spreading of HIV, not homosexuality.
I think the trend until mid 90s was to use your real name. Then it kind of changed at some point in 90s to nicknames. Now we seem to be going back to the early 90s when it was common to use your name.
German Usenet was and still is (in)famous for demanding real names.
In the late nineties and early 00s there ware huge wars between those who campaigned for pseudonyms (usually labelled "net terrorists", although honestly most of them really were trolls) and those who insisted on real names (labelled as "Blockwart": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockleiter).
Of course it's immaterial now. Most of the "net terrorists" left, many of the "blockwarts" mellowed, and in the end Usenet is dead and both sides tolerate much more than they used to, just happy to see a few more postings.
Bingo. They should call themselves mongodocs, not mongodb. The way I see it mongodb sees widespread misunderstanding about its use cases and instead of make the use cases more clear, they seem to take an interest in seeing mongodb being used unnecessarily.
I think failures of projects such as this can be attributed to wrongly applying lean principles instead of coming out with a more complete offering. Checkout never really matured as a product and therefore made for a poor PayPal or merchant account alternative.
As a former Google Checkout/Wallet employee, this is completely right. When Checkout was first released, companies would get free AdWords credit to sign up and use the service. Also, non-profits got free processing. After this initial release and push to have this product adopted, nothing was done to move it forward. There were no updates and improvements made. The only changes were when patches and bug fixes for problems that affected a large amount of customers (not surprising since it is impossible to fix every issues that affects every customer, but when you are dealing with a product that some companies solely use to make a living you better try hard to fix as many problems as possible).
> After this initial release and push to have this product adopted, nothing was done to move it forward.
That describes so many Google services. Some live on anyway, because for whatever reasons they meet Google's interests to keep running (Google Books). Some don't.
Agreed. I think there was a period of like 5 years soon after they launched it big, where they did almost nothing to improve it or promote it. Same goes for Google Docs. I think only like a little more than 2 years ago they started caring about Google Docs again, probably because of Chrome OS and Chromebooks. Before that the development for it felt very dry for years, too.
A similar thing happened to a guy who scammed me and others. One of the guys who was scammed went to the local cops who took out a warrant. The guy who scammed us was arrested and released almost immediately. He paid the guy through the court and his attorney. I still remain unpaid...and I didn't go to the cops(mostly because nyc cops didn't care much about the case speaking to them on the phone). You can read more here if you're curious: http://cliffkaplanfraud.com/