Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

If other investors really are too risk averse why are they keeping these founders around? We could also do a carve-out if this mattered a lot where founders can sign over dividends and capital gains on 3% of their equity each year while retaining voting rights on the shares.

(1) Boards are typically so hesitant to oust founders that it's hard to know what conclusions you can draw from those cases. Softer power shifts are very tough to look at. Successful VCs are very pro-founder. Maybe the entire system is wrong, but it's not a test I wanna run live.

(2) Tech investors are WONDERFULLY *not* averse to risk. It's made them, along with their founders, extremely wealthy. Which means they are also subject to a 3% tax on everything they own, which is mostly... portfolios of tech companies.

What happens to all the founder/investor stock that *only* very successful owners have to sell off? Maybe their funds buy more of it back. Maybe VC compensation shifts rapidly from stock to income, further eroding skin in the game. Maybe less successful investors snap it up.

(3) There usually aren't dividends. Capital gains isn't a thing until stock is sold. You *could* transfer an increasing ownership stake in virtually every highly successful business to the federal government, but obviously DON'T DO THAT.

As long as they just auction off the stocks or do mirror voting seems like that would be fine? Agree we don't want active management by the IRS.

Actually having the IRS take 3% of the company on paper and just hold onto it and mirror vote solves your problem as everyone's votes are diluted equally!

If you zoom out a bit, what this looks like is the federal government gradually taking ownership of the country's most successful businesses under the guise of a tax that doesn't actually raise revenue. At bare minimum, this looks very, VERY bad