From Reddit discussions, if they can be trusted, there is nobody who can remove Matt from any position. It's a private company and the investors were given non-voting shares.
Even "taking their part of the money out" is not guaranteed. Again, it's a privately traded company, so there's no open market. You have to find someone willing to buy your shares from you and make a deal with them.
but the opposite is true too: don't take money from investors unless they let you keep control of your company. for every case like this there are probably a dozen cases where investors took control of a company and ruined it for the sake of making money.
Presumably if you as a founder are not driven by a desire to make money and your investors are, you 100% should be ousted. This is the principal-agent problem at work.
> Presumably if you as a founder are not driven by a desire to make money and your investors are, you 100% should be ousted
Presumably, the real world is a bit more nuanced than that.
There is no reason why you cannot run a company for different motivations than "get as rich as possible" while still accepting investments from people whose sole motivation is "get as rich as possible". While difficult, it is possible to align people even when they have different motivations.
What you are describing is exactly the principal-agent problem, and it is a real problem at startups when a founder is truly motivated by something that the investors don't care about. You can run a company with different motivations than your investors, but only so long as you return the goods they want. If they see you not returning the goods and not caring about that fact, they will try to replace you. They will try to do that a lot faster if you demonstrate that you don't care about giving them a return than if you show that you do care.
Conversely, investors can be mission-driven or otherwise aligned with you on something other than "maximize my return," but those investors rarely give you the best price.
Or it just sounded like a fun joke for a good company name... I mean you are not wrong, but pretty much any successful young entrepreneur must have some degree of excessive appreciation for themselves, and this one was already achieving that status at 19.
Knowing a number of successful entrepreneurs, many having hit success early as well - most don't need to enshrine themselves in the company name. It is indeed a tell.
If that wasn't enough of a tell, his behavior in the last few months spelled it out clearly, circled the relevant parts with a big fat red marker, and installed a blinking neon sign saying "narcissist".
i don't think that is how a tell works. of course now we know. hindsight and all that.
to decide whether it is actually a tell, we need to look at statistics of company names containing references to the owners/founders and their behavior. and i don't think that statistic bears out. naming your company after yourself is the traditional thing to do. "automattic" is just on the more clever side.
the tradition is changing only because it is becoming more and more popular to name your company after the product you are selling. now, putting your name into the product name, that maybe could be a tell. but even here there are exceptions: debian for example.
It's easy to call that a "tell" in light of Matt Mullenweg's recent activities. No one was saying shit when Wordpress was the darling of Web 2.0.
Justifiable evidence of Matt Mullenweg's unhealthy/excessive narcissism only surfaced within the past year or so (I'm fuzzy on the timeline, cut me some slack ya?). Automattic the company has been so named for, goodness, close to twenty years now.
It could be Matt's been a narcissist from the start. But people also change and not always for the better so maybe he became a "narcissist" much later in life and his chosen company name just so conveniently fell into the narrative.
There are CEOs in bigger spotlights with a bigger case for narcissism who don't put their names on any of their companies (emphasis on the plurality). One of them has a name with a similar inflection pattern to other well-known albeit fictional narcissist, Tony Stark.
I don't know what "Automattic" as a company name says about Matt as a person. I'll tell you what it is though: a damn good pun, one I would gladly score myself given the chance.
