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NancyLebovitz comments on Politics Discussion Thread September 2012 - Less Wrong
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History of Wizards of the Coast as told by the founder, Dave Adkinson. One point that caught my eye is that even though he's an excellent administrator (he shepherded his company through a half a dozen or so major changes), he was eventually pushed out of the business because eventually the only thing which made sense was to sell it to Hasbro. After a while, he lost so much control that they'd squeezed out the only thing he could think of to do with the business.
I'm not worried about him-- he's going to film school, and I expect he's going to do something worth seeing and make money at it.
However, I think there's something massively wrong with a system that punishes success. What might need to be different to prevent that sort of outcome?
The video might be of general interest because it's a brilliant example of someone who's reliably concerned with something to protect.
Selling your company to someone for huge amounts of money isn't exactly "punishing" success
It's punishment because he really wanted to keep working with Magic: The Gathering.
But I'm sure he could have kept working with Magic: The Gathering, if he'd been willing to take a couple of steps down the ladder. Alternatively, he could have kept in the same position with Magic: The Gathering if he'd been willing to buy a majority of the stock.
His actual desire seems to have been to run Magic: The Gathering exactly as he wanted, but also for other people to supply the capital to enable this. I'd like other people to buy me a pony too, but I don't regard it as punishment when they don't.
His problem was that he'd traded equity (98% of it) for a lot of the work done on Magic, and the people who held that equity wanted to be able to cash it out.
I don't know whether selling bonds could have helped anything.
He sold his rights, then groused when those he sold them to did something other than he wanted with those rights?
Sounds like he wanted to have his company, and sell it too.
I don't think he especially wanted to sell his company, but (at least as I understand the way he told it) , too many of the people who had equity wanted a chance to cash out for him to be comfortable not doing so.
He could start his own card game with blackjack and hookers.
Letting founders remain permanently in control under all forms of incorporation is very far from profit-maximizing, sorry! The system is working as designed.