Above the Crowd

[Follow Me on Twitter] I like to think of myself as an aficionado of business disruption. After all, as a venture capitalist it is imperative to understand ways in which a smaller private company can gain the upper hand on a large incumbent. One of the most successful ways to do this is to change the rules of the game in such a way that the incumbent would need to abandon or destroy its core business in order to lay chase to your strategy. This thinking, which was eloquently chronicled in Clay Christiansen’s The Innovator’s Delimma , is the key premise behind recently successful business movements like […]

Prominent finance publications like the WSJ and the Motley Fool along with  several bloggers have recently taken shots at Google with respect to their decision to re-price a boat-load of employee stock options.  Just to review the details, in their last earnings call google management stated that they would offer all employees with options that have strike prices above the current price the ability to trade in those options for new ones with a lower strike price.  This affects about 3% of the shares outstanding, and resulted in a one time charge of almost half a billion dollars.  The journalist that take issue with this suggest that shareholders […]