I get where you are coming from but in my mind, when mutating into the dominant culture it loses vital, essential characteristics.
Counterculture, modified by the relentless shameless drive to "make it", and the acceptance of operating within existing systems, is no longer a counterculture.
My point being a question; did counterculture truly win or was it subsumed and perverted?
"And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." - Hunter S Thompson
arguably, no. counterculture ceases to exist when it becomes dominant culture, but it's not that "it won" - countercultural concepts are either adopted into mainstream culture through a widespread genuine desire for change (no longer countercultural, simply cultural), or they're vapidly recuperated (see chain stores like Hot Topic or Zumiez, if you're in the US) into commodity goods.
Oh, also: if you feel like you're being forced to do anything, or negotiated hard against at all, or losing battles, just lawyer up. Depending on your jurisdiction you could start saying things like, "I dunno, sounds like oppression -- let's just do what's best for the company here".
The exact details are unclear from the original post, but he definitely isn't giving up 40%. If they've only raised the pre-seed (a reasonable inference given the low valuation), then 10% ownership after 18 months points to two co-founders and a combined investor and option pool dilution of 20%. Anything is possible, of course, but unless the deal terms were very non-standard, this scenario makes the most sense.
You're right that 10% isn't necessarily a huge deal for investors, though. Early-round investor models target a specific ownership stake, and the company has to issue the same number of shares for that no matter what the composition of existing shareholders is.
The challenge with founders leaving is more psychological, like an early engineer who's vested a quarter of their 1% grant realizing that they still have to work hard for three years just to get a tenth of what the guy leaving already has. That's an easy way to suffocate the remaining team's motivation. Potential investors will (and should) look into it, but most of the time it's fine.
I'm not saying I agree with the concern, I'm just articulating what it is. I think the answer here is super simple: walk away with the 10% vested. (Also: stop thinking in terms of %).
You can think of your equity in terms of buckets: you get some for having the courage to start, some for the grind, and some for future returns. You're giving back the future returns bucket, not the other two. The vesting mechanism imperfectly maps to this.
Keep the equity. It's not "dead" in any real sense (though people will describe it that way to talk the value down). Dilution will hit it anyway. Again: you are already relinquishing the future value when you stop vesting.
If you have a board seat, consider staying in that capacity. Then at the next round perhaps sell the seat and equity to an incoming investor. Early on, board seats are more valuable than stock and selling that package, perhaps at a discount to the incoming valuation, is fairly compelling. Your exit then fits the playbook for exiting early angels -- it's not weird.
Taking cash is a bad signal in a couple of ways: it signals that you don't believe in the new direction and it signals the remaining founder is making poor financial decisions. Unless the framing is that you took a low buyout to walk, which isn't a great look for anyone.
Message it as what's best for the business, and be firm when they ask you to relinquish the equity. You said it very well in your post: "this is a great idea, but I'm not the right fit. I'll stay on in an advisory and governance capacity, but my last day as an officer and employee will be end of next month." Give the company lots of time and help to move on.
Help the company by setting it up to be so valuable that an incoming investor will want to remediate the situation by sweeping you off the cap table (again, like an early angel).
Depending on your counterparties it might not be possible to preserve relationships. Make sure you can afford litigation. Depending on your financial position this means get a new job or start a new business. When someone says, "relinquish or I'll sue" then you generally want to answer "my counsel will accept service at this address: xyz".
No it doesn't. It's very difficult to imagine a plausible circumstance where you have a company that took significant investment where you could hold a board seat that the board could not eject you from after you left the company. You can't sell a board seat.
This person isn't an investor, but even an investor can't sell their board seat. This is getting silly. "Hold on to your founder board seat and sell it later" is not real advice.
As a hypothetical, kind of? But not really. The board is written into the company's bylaws, as a rule, and requires a board vote to change. 'Selling your board seat' really means engineering a complex deal that requires a bunch of other people to sign off.
The same is true of selling your equity, by the way. As a founder you have common shares, but early-stage investors want preferred shares with QSBS treatment. Even if you're allowed to sell your shares, which most startups don't let you do, it's not in your power to convert them to preferred or give the buyer QSBS treatment.
A startup that has a board is a company you can't sell a board seat at. This is past silly. Despite what you wrote earlier, "holding on to and selling" board seats is not a thing.
You're simply wrong, I have done deals like this. You are clearly quite upset about something, and are not providing a clear argument -- relying instead on personal attacks and "no true Scotsman" goal post shifting.
I have no idea who you are and there's nothing personal about any of this, but I am concerned that people are going to read this and come away with the idea that departing founders with board seats generally sell them, and when they try that, everybody is going to look at them like they're both naive and irrational --- exactly what the original poster said they were trying to avoid.
The problem we have in all these threads is that sometimes people just say stuff, because it sounds interesting or it's fun to fantasize about, and it's hard to tell that stuff apart from actual advice.
This person probably doesn't even have a board seat, but either way: you're not selling a board seat.
> The fact that, much later on, many elements of the laptops history and provenance were confirmed as legitimate (with some open questions) is important
There are two separate "the story"s. One is a story about Hunter Biden's laptop. One is a story about political interference and/or bias at Twitter.
At least some of the story about Hunter Biden's laptop was true. That doesn't tell us anything about whether the story about political interference and/or bias at Twitter was true.
The linked article argues that (1) there wasn't in fact political interference at Twitter, (2) although Twitter employees (like employees of many many many tech companies) lean left, there was no sign that anything in the company's treatment of the H.B. laptop story was politically motivated, and (3) the fact that Twitter nerfed links to the NY Post's story about H.B.'s laptop for one day (a) more likely increased than decreased interest in that story and (b) had no impact to speak of on the presidential election anyway.
Of course it might be wrong about any or all of those things, but whether the NY Post's story about the laptop was actually true or not has nothing to do with any of them.
(The assertion being made upthread here is that Twitter's handling of the story was a deliberate attempt to "suppress" Donald Trump and that it handed the election to Joe Biden. It's all about the second story, not the first one.)
> At least some of the story about Hunter Biden's laptop was true. That doesn't tell us anything about whether the story about political interference and/or bias at Twitter was true.
The extended lockdowns 100% ended his term. It upset too many people for too long. Regardless of actual responsiblity, big nationwide negative events always get laid at the feet of the current sitting president.
Nope. In terms of presidential politics, covid was basically the same as an economic downturn; if it happens while you're the president, the electorate will blame it on you regardless of whether you had anything to do with it.
In the case of Bush in the 2004 election, at that time they were pushing the story that Iraq had been developing WMDs; that was the initial justification for the invasion. Obviously false in hindsight, but at the time people were still pretty raw about 9/11, so critical thinking was in short supply, but--most importantly--it provided an enemy to focus on.
In the case of covid there was no comparable enemy. "Declaring war" on a virus would not have anywhere near the same impact as using the military to actually wage war on another country.
> In the case of covid there was no comparable enemy. "Declaring war" on a virus would not have anywhere near the same impact as using the military to actually wage war on another country.
I disagree. Look at the way we talk about it, "the covid", "covid did this", etc. It absolutely would have worked as an enemy to declare war on and I don't think the vast majority of people would consider it trump's fault if he just got out ahead of it.
Imagine a world where he didn't do trumpy things and instead did things like talking about how this is a national, world wide foe we all need to work together to defeat, I know it's hard, we'll all make sacrifices, but we're the nation that beat the nazis and went to the moon, we can win this war on covid. For further details here are my science advisors talking about the latest info on counter measures.
Obviously this is imagining a world where trump isn't trump, but I very much believe obama/clinton/bush/etc would have been re-elected.
Keep in mind that we also have a strong tendency to re-elect the incumbent anyways and covid is an amazing opportunity to blame all your previous fuck ups on this new "totally unforseeable/preventable disease cataclysm!"
I agree with everyone else that Covid definitely lost Trump the 2020 election. Saying it would have been a lay-up for someone who isn't Trump is meaningless when we're talking about Trump. When there's a crisis people crave strong leaders who can guide them through it, and Trump completely fucked up his messaging. One day everything will be fine in a few weeks, the next day Covid is extremely serious, then he's trying to get people to use horse medicine from Tractor Supply as a home remedy, etc. Compare that to how people around the nation were paying attention to Andrew Cuomo's daily press conferences. Despite Cuomo making extremely incompetent decisions around Covid (such as using nursing homes as overflow space for Covid patients, causing over 15,000 deaths), he got a huge popularity bump at the time because he appeared strong and competent and Trump didn't.
Covid was devastating for the whole world. I don't see how it is an "easy layup" for anybody or any country. Was there any country or scenario where it was an "easy layup"?
wredcoll doesn't mean that COVID-19 was good for the US, any more than they mean that 9/11 was good for the US. They mean (rightly or wrongly) that it should have been easy for the sitting US government to respond to it in a way that made itself look good and helped it get re-elected, just as G W Bush was able to respond to 9/11 in a way that made him look good and helped him get re-elected.
(I'm not convinced that that's right, but it isn't refuted by the fact that COVID-19 was devastating for the world in general and the US in particular.)
Because the laptop includes a lot a emails. A lot of those emails include Hunter selling access to his father and suggesting that his father was in the the scheme with him. Whether or not Joe was actually involved vs. Hunter making it up to get these people to give him what he wanted is an open question, but this isn't something that should have been actively suppressed by the media just a few weeks before the election.
Fox News hyped up Hunter to distract people from the immense corruption between Jared Kushner and the Saudis. Kushner got a $2 billion investment fund from the Saudis.
It was the New York Post (not Fox) that broke the story about the laptop, and that got censored by various social media companies acting on the (false) advice of federal agents to do so.
Again, Hunter Biden is completely irrelevant and hyped up by the GOP Propaganda machine to distract people from Trump's blatant corruption. Biden was 1 million times less corrupt as President than Trump. This is a really standard part of the GOP playbook, they did it with Hillary Clinton and Benghazi. They did it with the "migrant caravan of DOOM".
0: https://hackaday.com/2025/06/03/my-winter-of-99-the-year-of-...
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