Does Mathowie strike it big with Giphy?

May 19, 2020 2:32 AM

Mathowie (of Metafilter fame, etc.) shares his experiences as an early investor in Giphy, an online short video/ meme maker, which was acquired by Facebook for $400M earlier this week.
posted by zeikka (55 comments total)

Wow... an entire page of just animated gifs... They finally made geocities slightly classier.
posted by Nanukthedog at 3:00 AM on May 19, 2020 [2 favorites]

winterhill: Giphy embeds cookies & other tracking techniques with the animated gifs it serves up. Which means for Facebook, it’s a way to insert tracking of FB users into spaces that might otherwise be completely opaque to them that use giphy: Slack chats, Discord chats, all that kind of thing.

For Facebook, that tracking ability is worth a lot of money - the nightmare for them is their userbase migrating to platforms they don’t have any visibility into, because that completely devalues the ad platform they offer.
posted by pharm at 3:10 AM on May 19, 2020 [46 favorites]

^ So this is how the sausage is made, huh?
posted by fairmettle at 3:34 AM on May 19, 2020 [8 favorites]

I'm not a fan of FB by any means, but the tracking ability of Giphy is a little more complex than it appears at first glance. John Gruber of Daring Fireball has been collecting a few links on this: Giphy does not receive any information about users or even companies using the Giphy for Slack integration. In the Signal app (and most likely the Apple Messages app) the identity of the user is obfuscated as well.

Those are minor points anyway, Matt's tweets are really about how the angel investing game is ridiculously stacked towards the rich and how VC money is toxic. One of the people responding to his post pointed out this article which states that the average return for VC/Angel investing is between 0 and 2%. 😲
posted by jeremias at 3:40 AM on May 19, 2020 [13 favorites]

Isn't this site pretty much entirely made up of short clips from copyrighted films and TV programmes?

My gut reaction from that first screenshot: Disney had owned the Muppets for several years by 2014, right? Did Alphaworks have its paperwork in order to put Kermit the Frog in that response, or did anybody care one way or the other?

Presumably the leviathan that Facebook has become has enough faceless lawyers and virtual-paper-pushers to sort out all the weirdness of tracking intellectual property claims through the business model. There's just a whiff of "rules are for you, not me" hanging over all this, nevertheless.
posted by gimonca at 3:49 AM on May 19, 2020 [5 favorites]

Had never looked at giphy, omg doing a search on a relatively obscure term returns pages and pages of spinning, blinking, looping, hypnotic brain draining gifs. The tech may not be tracking but it's certainly some form of subversive mind control. Yow.

...Giphy does not receive any information about users...

In specific, in aggregate when passed into a big data analysis engine that correlates the posting patterns of zillions upon zillions of interaction vectors it'll certainly add value to the graph of facebook users.

Also if apps can track from a typing pattern footprint for instance, adding a personal pattern of gifs added to posts is just another useful datapoint. The pattern of term searches could be really useful. And don't think NOT using giphy keeps you safe, *just not using it at all* marks another pattern to be observed and analyzed.

(I for one am making tinfoil masks just to be double safe during the pandemic)
posted by sammyo at 4:18 AM on May 19, 2020 [8 favorites]

Isn't this site pretty much entirely made up of short clips from copyrighted films and TV programmes? $400 million seems like a lot of money for a website full of other people's content.

I mean, it was bought by Facebook. They know a thing or two about monetising content they don't produce.
posted by atrazine at 4:51 AM on May 19, 2020 [18 favorites]

We invested a small amount in a local ice cream chain a few years ago, partly because we were curious to see how the financial guts of the ice cream business worked but mostly because we like ice cream a lot. They went bankrupt a month ago or so, but we worked it out and our losses were minor when considered on a per-scoop basis.

Small angel investments are a good way to help a business get rolling, but it's not for people who need to see that money again. It's more about wanting to help something exist in the world. I get the sense that's why matthowie invested, anyway.

Also, Giphy bought Electric Objects a few years back and has been keeping the servers on out of inertia. I expect that should go dark pretty much immediately, which is why it's a happy coincidence that I just rooted my EO1 a few days ago.
posted by phooky at 5:21 AM on May 19, 2020 [5 favorites]

The question that I didn't see answered in Matt's thread:

How is that initial investment just "disappeared" from the books? Is it that there's no promised return? Is the investment not for a specific share of the company?

I understand that 9/10 new businesses will straight-up tank, but if Matt owned (for example) 1% of proto-GIPHY, then wouldn't he have a legitimate claim to some GIPHY stock/ownership even if it went through a few mergers or acquisitions?
posted by explosion at 6:07 AM on May 19, 2020 [4 favorites]

Class warfare and privacy concerns aside, the real crime here is their perpetuating the mispronounciation.
posted by 7segment at 6:18 AM on May 19, 2020 [9 favorites]

Giphy does a lot of machine learning which is a pretty hot commodity probably inflating that valuation too.
posted by zsh2v1 at 6:31 AM on May 19, 2020

If something sells for 10-50x its original valuation and you don't make a profit, it isn't an investment. It's a g(r)ift.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:56 AM on May 19, 2020 [7 favorites]

The most surprising thing to me is that any of this is surprising to anyone who gets to the point where they can afford to toss tens of thousands of dollars on a long-shot bet. Rule #1 of casino games is to know the rules of the game. If the rules are so complex, ephemeral, and subject to the vagaries of who acquires whom or how much your stake gets diluted between when you invest and when you want to cash out, then it was your fault for placing the bet without knowing the terms. If that's what the entire VC system is built on -- and it certainly seems that way -- then you need to look at it as entertainment with no expectation of a profit the way the more responsible casino gamblers do.
posted by tonycpsu at 7:05 AM on May 19, 2020 [3 favorites]

I'm pretty sure Tom Scott covered Giphy's legal situation in his 41 minute Copyright Omnibus a few weeks back, but I'm not about to watch all of it again just to be sure. But probably? It seems like a thing he would've covered in it?
posted by Kyol at 7:16 AM on May 19, 2020 [2 favorites]

daffyduckimrich.gif
posted by Melismata at 7:25 AM on May 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

How is that initial investment just "disappeared" from the books? Is it that there's no promised return? Is the investment not for a specific share of the company?

When companies want to raise money selling stock (including public companies), they create new shares of stock. The company doesn’t hold stock directly, the shareholders do.

This makes all the shares worth less. If the company raises a lot of money but the overall value of the company doesn’t rise commensurately, small amounts may be worth peanuts.

Behind that, private companies make other complex arrangements involving different classes of shares. Preferred shares might get paid out first and have a guarantee of 1.1x the price paid. If there’s money after that, the common shares get paid out.

Or the company does something insane, everyone gets screwed, and you all go to court.
posted by JoeBlubaugh at 7:26 AM on May 19, 2020 [5 favorites]

Maybe I'm missing something, but his experience is "I was a series A investor, now Giphy is sold, if I ever find out what if anything I made from this I will let you know" -- this feels really premature as a post, without any real details about how tech investing works such that companies that sell for 100x or more what they raised still only give some investors 5x or less, or anything other than "I didn't make money even though my friends did".
posted by jeather at 7:31 AM on May 19, 2020 [6 favorites]

My guess is that on the one hand, his shares are diluted. However, on the other hand, he should still get a check, however small, (or converted to a tiny tiny sliver of a fraction of Facebook stock??) but sounds like that fell through the cracks as well. [ Small or out-of-mind things fall through the cracks in any company or organization constantly when it's nobody's job to care about them and the company goes through personel, management, organizational change. ]
posted by thefool at 8:24 AM on May 19, 2020

The fact that Matt's investment will end up being worthless despite a $400M acquisition is awful, but somewhat unsurprising given all the preferred investor terms later stage VCs write for themselves. That was always one of the risks of amateur angel investing like Alphaworks was trying to do; the amateurs get the shittiest deal often without even knowing they did.

What makes me mad is no one has told Matt, a shareholder, about the acquisition or informed him about the status of his investment. Now the deal only closed 4 days ago, maybe they'll get around to it. They have a legal obligation to.

But it's quite common for investors in early startups to just get forgotten, or their paperwork misplaced, or otherwise for some sloppy lawyer / accountant to drop the ball and drop someone off the cap table. It's crazy, but it happens a lot. Here's a story about broken cap tables from 2015 by eShares (now Carta), a company selling a cap table product.

I've gotten shares in a few startups over the years. I always make a point of writing the company's lawyer or CFO or whoever once a year or so, just checking up that they still have my ownership registered correctly. So far so good but it's a bit of a nuisance for everyone. But when the cap table is literally a hand edited spreadsheet, you have to protect yourself.
posted by Nelson at 8:27 AM on May 19, 2020 [8 favorites]

This is a closely related, but slightly different, manifestation of the scenario that played out in The Big Short.

In 2007, the writing was on the wall, and everyone knew that there was a meltdown coming. If you wanted to short the market, and you weren't an insider, you had to come up with millions (IIRC over $10 Million) to even play.

Even betting against the overleveraged rich idiots isn't allowed unless you're also rich.

The gatekeepers have ensured that the idiot sons of rich fathers get a bite at the apple before a smart person who gets in on day one that isn't rich.

Stock/ownership dilution should be banned.
posted by tclark at 8:34 AM on May 19, 2020 [8 favorites]

This makes me think that using an app like Robinhood for small dollar investments is a dumb idea. For example, owning 100 shares of big_company_x at $5.00 each is probably just throwing money away?
posted by NoMich at 8:50 AM on May 19, 2020

You're not throwing it away investing in BIGCO, but you're not going to see large price swings giving you a good payout either, and AFAIK the advice for small investors remains the same: buy an index fund and hold it. Anything else is small stakes gambling.
posted by fatbird at 8:58 AM on May 19, 2020 [6 favorites]

Never the right window; for a proper brick.
posted by Afghan Stan at 9:00 AM on May 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

Another relevant story from the POV of employees with early equity.

Spoiler: it’s not any better than small family/friends investments. Tech/startup equity mainly benefits the few rich and/or lotto-winning-type lucky.
posted by curoi at 9:25 AM on May 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

The gatekeepers have ensured that the idiot sons of rich fathers get a bite at the apple before a smart person who gets in on day one that isn't rich.

Yes, the lesson from 2008 was that Joe Shmoe from off the street should have the right to mass 6 or 7 figures of debt without having to prove the capability to ever pay it back.
posted by sideshow at 9:33 AM on May 19, 2020 [2 favorites]

There are a lot of Americans, including otherwise intelligent tech industry workers, for who the dream of a big payout is as important or more important than the expected ROI of the investment. In such a scenario, it's not that the money is being thrown away, but that it's being exchanged for the ability to dream on the possibilities. It's how you get people sneering at being paid in "paper money" (also known as "money") instead of stock options that have a ludicrously high theoretical value that may end up being worthless.
posted by tonycpsu at 9:33 AM on May 19, 2020 [5 favorites]

Lightswitch05's facebook-extended.txt - blocking list for all Facebook properties, now with extra Giphy blocking power. Only 4908 domains ...
posted by benzenedream at 9:34 AM on May 19, 2020 [4 favorites]

Yes, the lesson from 2008 was that Joe Shmoe from off the street should have the right to mass 6 or 7 figures of debt without having to prove the capability to ever pay it back.

You can only amass that kind of debt through leverage. Investing $X in a company does not involve leverage if you have $X. Like, you can't go into $5M in debt by investing $2500 in a company.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:35 AM on May 19, 2020

One thing I've seen is that when a company makes a little headway, all the VC firms that ponied up 50k to get it started need to kick in another 100k to keep it going, now that the burn rate is higher. If one of the firms doesn't feel like doing it, there is a lot of pressure that turns into a bit of a game of chicken--because there are ways to totally screw that holdout, who can also make life miserable if you do so. But to get the full payout you aren't just buying in once.

I was going to expand on this a bit but Curoi's link is pretty good.

And I have to agree with the comment in the link that this is not automatically unfair. My take is it's nice to think "Oh, I own 10% of the company and I got in early so if they make it big I'll get a payout!" but that makes no particular sense if the company went through 3 rounds of life-saving fundraising that dwarfed your initial investment (which would have been worth zero anyway) and you did bupkiss. I mean, I suppose it's unfair that you don't have the capital for multiple hundred thousand dollar investments to play this particular game and other people do, but that's like an evergreen observation in this world.

This applies to shares-for-labor too--if you put in a couple years at the ground floor and at that time have 5%, but move on to other things, a couple hundred other people make it a unicorn 10 years later, no way do you "deserve" the 50 million. The unfairness there is that labor is generally underpaid; there's no reason to get teary eyed about the inability of some privileged/lucky laborers to expropriate the frutis of other people's labor.
posted by mark k at 9:51 AM on May 19, 2020 [4 favorites]

Well he can always rest easy on those Metafilter millions =) And maybe buy a real blog some day instead of barely readable stories on Twitter.
posted by pwnguin at 10:08 AM on May 19, 2020 [2 favorites]

Yes, the lesson from 2008 was that Joe Shmoe from off the street should have the right to mass 6 or 7 figures of debt without having to prove the capability to ever pay it back.

Who's talking about debt? Did you see mathowie's post that if you don't have an annual INCOME of $400k you aren't allowed to invest? Even if you have the cash on hand?

And you couldn't short the CDO market without millions in cash on hand. If I were allowed to drop $1k on the short, I would've made many times that, but I'm not an idiot rich kid.
posted by tclark at 10:13 AM on May 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

Yes, the lesson from 2008 was that Joe Shmoe from off the street should have the right to mass 6 or 7 figures of debt without having to prove the capability to ever pay it back.

I also should add that due to the gatekeeping involved in investment and financial activity, the fart-huffing among the moneyed class wasn't kept in check by the larger market. If ordinary investors had been allowed to short the real estate market, even if the requirement was that they did so with cash rather than debt, the bubble may have not grown so out of hand. Because the bears were effectively locked out entirely, all that was left were the gullible, greedy idiots who were playing timing games to see how much they could squeeze out of doomed securities.
posted by tclark at 10:20 AM on May 19, 2020 [3 favorites]

Who's talking about debt? Did you see mathowie's post that if you don't have an annual INCOME of $400k you aren't allowed to invest? Even if you have the cash on hand?

The idea with the "qualified investor" stuff is that people doing this sort of thing should be 'sophisticated' enough to understand the sort of ways you can get screwed and/or absorb the loss. The actual criteria are a bit less than matthowie describes but still you are supposed to have money to spare.

The problem with "cash on hand" is you can have that while having a $500k mortgage--which is what people do. Plenty of Madoff's victims were investing that way, for example.

If ordinary investors had been allowed to short the real estate market, even if the requirement was that they did so with cash rather than debt, the bubble may have not grown so out of hand

This is almost certainly wrong. A "short" is not actually symmetric to a "long" in practice for various reasons, and it's quite possible the result would have been naive speculators investors thinking it *was* symmetrical and getting shorn in a short squeeze before the crash.

I'm less anti-market, burn-it-all-down than a lot of people on MetaFilter but IMHO the issue is really, really not that the main injustice is the lack of access to the glorious financial speculation tools available to the rich.
posted by mark k at 10:50 AM on May 19, 2020 [5 favorites]

Giphy raised about $150m over four rounds, most recent was a $72m round D in 2016. VC investors usually have preference shares with liquidation preferences. When you invest with a liquidation preference, you get at least the liquidation multiple back and later investors get their money back first. 1x is very common (so you get your money back).
posted by atrazine at 11:29 AM on May 19, 2020

GiPHY did another round in 2015, and in total they raised $72M but sold to FB for $400M. Tech investing is like "Hollywood accounting" b/c something can sell for 10x or 50x what investors put in and investors can barely break even. The 5x multiplier means I might get little back.

Why does this work this way?
posted by Urtylug at 12:35 PM on May 19, 2020

Why does this work this way?

The ultra-rich write the rules?
posted by Special Agent Dale Cooper at 12:42 PM on May 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

> Why does this work this way?

Dilution and liquidity preferences are basically enticements to convince additional investors to join a ship that would probably sink without their money. Why else would outside investors buy in where insiders / angels are unable or unwilling to? The dilution sucks, but is presumably preferable to owning shares in a bankrupt company. And for some reason is preferable to adjusting the cap table to directly reflect the losses of angel investors?
posted by pwnguin at 1:16 PM on May 19, 2020 [4 favorites]

Mathowie now posts:

nice surprise: sounds like everyone in the A round will see a 5x+ return. This would be my best performing investment of all of them most likely.

The funding round vs. the final sale was about 30x bigger, so 5x is less than that, but still pretty good compared to other investments that scored acquisitions/buyouts.
posted by w0mbat at 2:59 PM on May 19, 2020 [4 favorites]

MEFI PARTY AT MATT'S HOUSE!

(when the 'rona is over)
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 3:23 PM on May 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

Stock/ownership dilution should be banned.

How would that work? That literally means that the first round of funding would also be the last as no amount of additional funding outside of debt would be possible. Rather radical switch in how capital markets work as every company would be forever stuck with the capital that they were started with.
posted by zeikka at 5:10 PM on May 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

As far as I understand it, "accredited investor" (which is what you'd have to be to participate in this sort of early stage investment) is either income of $200k/year or $300k/yr with your spouse, or a net worth of $1 million excluding your primary residence. And I don't believe that definition has changed since I first became aware of it, which was in the early 2000's.

So it's confusing to me that people are mentioning "qualified": my understanding is that a "qualified purchaser" is one that controls assets of $5 million. There are some sorts of hedge funds that require you to be a qualified purchaser, being an accredited investor isn't enough.

And there's another level beyond that which boggles my mind which means you must basically be an institutional investor, I don't honestly know what the SEC calls that or how much you have to have.

I've spent *way* too much time looking into these rules, because I not only did the tech startup thing, but then I moved on to produce theater commercially, and it turns out that commercial theater productions follow the same rules that tech startups do.
posted by grae at 6:28 PM on May 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

How would that work? That literally means that the first round of funding would also be the last as no amount of additional funding outside of debt would be possible. Rather radical switch in how capital markets work as every company would be forever stuck with the capital that they were started with.

People don't sell 100% of the stock of a company in your first round. They don't sell 100% of what remains in the second round. They don't sell 100% of what remains at Series A through X. Nobody does, otherwise, as you say, no further funding rounds could exist. If a $1500 investment gets you 1% of the company, when the valuation goes up you should still own 1% of the goddamn company, unless the new investor wants to pay YOU the valuation price for your 1%. No, instead they throw special stock classes at the founders in exchange for making the poor schmuck who bought 1% of the company before get 0.000001% now.

Dilution is bullshit. It's plutocratic and anti-capitalist. And it absolutely should be banned.
posted by tclark at 10:03 PM on May 19, 2020 [4 favorites]

Whenever I see the the words "Facebook" and "dilution" together, I hear Zero. Point. Zero. Three. Percent, to the excellent bgm: "Hand Covers Bruise".
posted by fatehunter at 11:02 PM on May 19, 2020

How would that work? That literally means that the first round of funding would also be the last as no amount of additional funding outside of debt would be possible. Rather radical switch in how capital markets work as every company would be forever stuck with the capital that they were started with.

The current dilution model appears to be "we issue more brand-new shares without consideration of those already existing, so if you didn't buy any of those you're SOL in terms of your ownership stake".

An alternate model would be to do some kind of implied-sale-split thing (technical terms, clearly)... By way of example: "There are 1000 shares today valued at $X. We will do a 1-10 split at a $Y valuation (Y > X), existing stock owners have first right to purchase the 9 'fresh-split' shares at the new valuation, otherwise those shares are sold to the investors and the original shareholder is paid for the increase in value, while retaining their previous numerical share count."

No doubt this is... shall we say... challenging, maybe mostly from a taxation perspective, but it gives some new incentives to early investors and a faster return on investment as an upside. Messes with vesting for early investors and founders for sure, but that can be offset with either escrow terms or a reinvest clause (if you don't buy outright, your "sale" revenue is used to purchase whatever that quantity of shares at the new valuation would be).
posted by clicking the 'Post Comment' button at 4:59 AM on May 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

I'd like Giphy better if it didn't have all those damn embed options, which one is the right one? why is it making it mp4? does the site I'm using use MP4? do I need a direct link? embed? blah blah blah. Just let me copy paste a fucking single URL and put in img src tags like the old days.

stupid technology.
posted by symbioid at 10:45 AM on May 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

As for FB owning them, just because the tracking now is safe, doesn't mean FB can't just add it later? IDK, seems pretty obvious to me...
posted by symbioid at 10:46 AM on May 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

If there's anybody who actually deserved to get filthy rich from this Internet thing, it's Matt. He refused many times over the years to sell this community out to the highest bidder, who would have plastered ads all over the place and monetized MeFi into oblivion. We should all be grateful that he decided it was more important that MeFi continue to be what it is, and sad that the game still doesn't reward people like him.
posted by fuzz at 11:55 AM on May 20, 2020 [9 favorites]

People don't sell 100% of the stock of a company in your first round.

My understanding is that shares are created / destroyed as needed, and for any reasonable definition, 100 percent of shares in every round are allocated.

They don't sell 100% of what remains in the second round. They don't sell 100% of what remains at Series A through X. Nobody does, otherwise, as you say, no further funding rounds could exist. If a $1500 investment gets you 1% of the company, when the valuation goes up you should still own 1% of the goddamn company, unless the new investor wants to pay YOU the valuation price for your 1%. No, instead they throw special stock classes at the founders in exchange for making the poor schmuck who bought 1% of the company before get 0.000001% now.

And as long as that first round is all the cash a company ever needs to raise, that can work. Seems unlikely though when young companies discuss things like "burn rates" instead of "profits." When angels invest in a firm that's goal is to find enough users to justify another funding round, they've kinda bought into the idea of dilution in some form or another. But in theory, you shouldn't be too upset about dilution; when a company creates and sells shares, its balance sheet grows in proportion to the additional shares issued.

clicking the 'Post Comment' button's suggestion to allow early investors to buy in to later rounds is called 'pro rata rights' and is apparently increasingly common. There isn't a huge reason to object to those terms, but I doubt many angel investors can front the kind of cash required going into a $75m round C, so in practice, angels will be diluted regardless.

Liquidity preferences, I agree, suck and risk making the whole enterprise win-lose.

Dilution is bullshit. It's plutocratic and anti-capitalist. And it absolutely should be banned.

The very idea of the limited liability company is anti-capitalist. You have a bunch of people pooling their money together for common cause, and if it doesn't work out, they're protected legally from the worst consequences. And internally, they're very top down, with very little in the way of prices, markets or auctions. I have yet to find any stories of CEOs being chosen by winning the lowest bid, nor have I seen anyone attach prices to projects completed, bugs filed, or outages resolved.
posted by pwnguin at 2:26 PM on May 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

The very idea of the limited liability company is anti-capitalist.

But when so-called informed investors actually invest in an unlimited liability scheme (because the organisation pre-dated limited companies), they all get let off when it turns out that means unlimited liability. Funny how that turns out, eh?
posted by ambrosen at 9:36 AM on May 23, 2020

What am I missing on that story ambrosen? It seems like individuals being held personally responsible for losses.
posted by mark k at 8:51 PM on May 23, 2020

The Lloyds Names had to pay up in the end ambrosen. Unsurprisingly they didn’t like it very much, but they still had to pay.
posted by pharm at 8:37 AM on May 24, 2020

Aside from the holdouts who insisted they shouldn't have to pay anything that were the subject of the article, the Names in question had their loss capped at £100,000, as was mentioned in passing near the top of the article ambrosen linked.
posted by wierdo at 10:28 AM on May 24, 2020

But this was a settlement? Apparently Lloyd's is weird and not quite a private company, but Lloyd's settling with them seems different than just creating a limited liability about of thin air. To me it seems like consumers settling debt for pennies on the dollar or something.

Which is why I'm wondering if I'm missing something around the interpretation of this. But if it's just two parties agreeing on a transaction (which one of them couldn't offer) it wouldn't have any deeper meaning.
posted by mark k at 12:42 PM on May 25, 2020

The deeper meaning is that once you achieve a certain level of wealth you are seen as a person worthy of consideration by the ultra-wealthy, rather than mere livestock to be milked as much as possible and then slaughtered. Between is the shrinking middle class, who are milked for as long as possible.

If it's possible to find out who all was involved in the reinsurance consortium it would be interesting to know and possibly enlightening, but I honestly don't care enough to go searching.
posted by wierdo at 12:55 PM on May 25, 2020

Well, since you mentioned it, I went digging briefly and found this: For the first time in three centuries, the code of silence at the oldest insurance market in the world has been broken with the disclosure of the identities of thousands of figures who financed the market in 2000 and 2003.

So I guess it's normally secret, except that one time. Anyways, my argument isn't that we should abolish limited liability, but that we have accepted a middle ground and this instance only highlights the reasons we did so.
posted by pwnguin at 4:51 PM on May 29, 2020 [1 favorite]