Will Facebook ever be rid of the Winklevoss twins?

http://venturebeat.com/2011/01/13/facebook-appeal-winklevoss/

by shawndumas • 16 years ago

48 65 16 years ago

"I suspect that what want they’re really pursuing is recognition, either from Facebook or in court, that they were the brains behind Facebook."

In my mind, these twins will never be the reason why Facebook was successful, no matter what some court decides. The value of a new website is not the idea behind it, it is the hard work of adding some kind of value and the tough task of getting people to use it. The idea that Connect U could be a "website that connects college friends" is not what made Facebook successful; it was the hard work of Zuckerberg and those around him.

I hope the twins are granted their chance to appeal and lose everything. I also hope they're never mentioned by any news story again.

biggitybones2• 16 years ago

I love the inherent fact that they're essentially making a more solid and lucrative "exit" on an idea they probably only discussed at length and put no actual work into. Realistically they probably make out better from this (all things like time, effort etc considered) than if Zuckerberg never does Facebook.

I take that $20 mil in cash and $150 mil in stock, and if it's really not about the money like they say, I use it to be an angel investor or start other companies. This whole thing is getting tiresome.

hubb• 16 years ago

like several people have mentioned already, these guys actually did build a product. i wont speculate on what they're entitled to, but claiming all they did was 'discussed at length' some concept is factually incorrect.

not sure why you're being up-voted -- is there something i'm missing?

biggitybones2• 16 years ago

You're right - probably shouldn't have dismissed it as just being in the idea stage.

I still stand behind the other point though - the assumption behind their lawsuit is that they would have been able to do what Zuckerberg did - which is pure speculation. I'm of the opinion that their legal troubles and outcome end up making them substantially more than their idea would have anyway. So walk away with a boat load of money, lesson learned, and get your name behind some positive press instead of negative.

spinlock• 16 years ago

This is exactly right. If they were real entrepreneurs, they would take the $20M and do something with it. These guys are zeros. I hope they wind up with nothing.

JabavuAdams5• 16 years ago

Interesting -- I don't understand. These guys live in a very different reality from me.

When I think of what I could build / research with $5-10M cash in the bank...

JanezStupar3• 16 years ago

Well they were probably born with a golden spoon in their mouthes...

DanI-S3• 16 years ago

They also probably have lawyers begging them to proceed. They're the real winners in any situation like this.

JabavuAdams5• 16 years ago

This has been on my mind recently.

If I meet my financial goals, how do I prevent my child from turning into a helpless person who just couldn't possibly live on less than she was accustomed to, growing up?

I didn't really want for anything as a kid, but my parents weren't extravagant. Nevertheless, it did set a kind of baseline for me.

The problem is once you scale up, it's very hard to scale back down. I'm shocked by people who are struggling to live on $200 K+, but I suppose, perversely, it makes sense given what they've become accustomed to.

chmike• 16 years ago

One lesson I learn from this is to keep the way as clear as possible regarding intellectual and industrial property. A patent, when possible, might help to clear such type of issue.

Though I agree that the execution is as important as the initial idea, if not more. There is also luck in play here by the coincidence to start this project with exclusive access to high ranked universities inducing an outstanding attraction. It is not sure that this was part of the idea and strategy proposed by the twins.

jswinghammer• 16 years ago

So if Facebook failed tomorrow and lost all the investment put into it so far would they be on the hook because their idea caused all that capital to be wasted?

franze• 16 years ago

is there a venturebeat.com upvote campaign? i can't believe that they show up so often on the front page......

jeremymims2• 16 years ago

ConnectU was a full-fledged site at one point. It wasn't vaporware.

In fact, a feature they created called Social Butterfly to allow facebook users to export their data caused facebook to sue them. And it resulted in facebook storing e-mail addresses as images for many years to prevent anyone from easily switching services.

It's all well and good to say that we'll never know what ConnectU might have been. But we do know that the principle person expected to build a big piece of it went on to execute on that idea almost perfectly.

Are they entitled to anything? None of us really know for sure since we only have small pieces of hearsay. The courts will decide.

marknutter• 16 years ago

If Facebook wasn't so wildly successful, the Twins wouldn't bother suing Zuckerberg. It's sour grapes and lust for gold.

stanleydrew5• 16 years ago

This is really interesting. Being only tangentially aware of the entire Facebook saga (I haven't even seen the movie yet) I had thought the Winklevosses were just guys with an idea. I don't know where I got that impression though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConnectU

dstein2• 16 years ago

ConnectU was launched after Facebook. Their original idea, as explained in the movie is that "Harvard Connection" was a dating site for Harvard students.

acconrad• 16 years ago

They are real-life troll faces.

dansingerman• 16 years ago

If they had invented Facebook they would have invented Facebook.

chopsueyar8• 16 years ago

If Facebook had invented Facebook, they would not have bought $40 million of patents from Friendster.

DanI-S3• 16 years ago

I don't think the Facebook concept is really something that is 'invented', per se. It is one of those kind of ideas that will emerge spontaneously at a certain point in the technological timeline, as the natural progression of things. It was Facebook's execution (as a product and a business) which raised it above the many similar services that appeared simultaneously.

stanleydrew5• 16 years ago

This does not follow at all.

mhb• 16 years ago

Their new idea: Cameron helped to start Guestofaguest.com, a Web site that offers information about “people, places and parties” in New York, Los Angeles and the Hamptons.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/31/business/31twins.html?page...

acangiano• 16 years ago

Good god, what a terrible name.

cpeterso• 16 years ago

"GOAG" sounds like something from an HP Lovecraft story.

trustfundbaby• 16 years ago

I think this Social Network quote from Zuckerberg sums them up perfectly.

"They're suing me because for the first time in their lives, things didn't work out the way they were supposed to for them"

They need to let it go.

krschultz• 16 years ago

I'm a big Mark Zuckerberg hater. He seemingly screwed over a couple people along the way taking the idea and running with it (breach of contract, unethical etc, even if you are doing all the work). But at this point Facebook has made all of those people incredibly wealthy through settlements of cash and even people owning sharers. Those people will only get more wealthy when they IPO.

Do they really think they could have made more money if Mark hadn't walked out on them and run built it all himself? You have $150 million dollars now, could you have made a billion dollar business? The idea behind Facebook was not all that unique. Certainly it was bad that he walked out on them and stole it, but would they have built a $50 billion company?

Just based on how they have acted since getting the settlement, I think not. You have $150 million now, that is enough money to fund 15 new ventures without ever going to a VC.

If these guys thought they could make more money than Zuckerburg without him, then DO IT. You can try 15 times before you are broke. That is a luxury almost none of the rest of us have.

Instead by constantly going back to the golden goose and trying to get money they are proving their inability to build a business. Facebook was a lottery win for them and they have no ability to do better. They are probably better off today with Mark having walked out on them ,than if they all stayed in it together and it failed and they owned a larger percent of 0.

chopsueyar8• 16 years ago

Facebook was a lottery win for Mark, too.

geebee3• 16 years ago

While it's difficult to ever really know what's going on in someone else's head, I actually do believe that the Winklevosses are pursuing this out of a sense of outrage and justice, not money. It's the motivation that makes the most sense to me.

That said (and again within my very limited knowledge of all this), I think that a $60+ million settlement is an incredibly good outcome for the winklevosses. I think that if they had found a different programmer, they would have produced yet another social networking site that went nowhere. Selling it for a tenth of their facebook settlement would have been an extraordinary outcome.

Why? Because startups run by non-programming business guys who hire a string of programmers who eventually quit and leave almost never succeed on facebook's level. Business guys like the winks greatly exaggerate the value of "an idea" and greatly underestimate way an idea can evolve into a new idea through implementation. They are almost always left in the dust.

Let me put it this way - if I went to a brilliant programmer with an "idea" - even one I had done quite a bit of implementation on, and he turned it into a multi-billion dollar company and offered me $60 million, I'd consider that a really good deal. Of course, that's not how this went down - the winks feel screwed because as far as I understand it, they kind of were. I'm basing this on the movie, so what can I say, no idea if this is true, but if I went to a programmer and he said, "yeah, I'm working on your site, I'll get back to you" over and over for a month, and at the end of the month he had launched a site that directly competes with the idea I thought he was working on for me, and then he told me bluntly and perhaps arrogantly that my idea was stupid and his was much better, and then used his advantage to beat me to every market, I'd be furious. I might be so furious that I'd be blinded to the truth, which is that I wouldn't have succeeded anyway.

I think the outcomes for the winks were

1) screwed and paid 60 mil 2) not screwed and paid probably nothing, maybe a small buyout nowhere near 60 mil.

emmett• 16 years ago

"I'm basing this on the movie".

Sigh. You know the movie isn't accurate. It's good story, it's not reality. Why would you make any comment on the motives of the players or the justice of the case using the movie as your primary source? The movie is basically historical fiction that happens to be set in the present day.

I knew that when the movie came out everyone would begin assuming that it was the true story of Facebook (despite protestations like "I have no idea if it's true"), but I'm literally seeing it in action here and it makes me sad.

You don't get to start from the movie as a "good guess" as to what happens. You don't get to use the movie as evidence at all.

dedward• 16 years ago

IT doesn't matter whether they would or would not have been as successful had things gone a different way. It's all about money - if they have a chance to tie facebook up in court for years about ownership, facebook is likely to pay an even larger settlement amount to make the problem go away.

DanielBMarkham• 16 years ago

Like the author says, these guys want the impossible: they want everybody to acknowledge that they were the genius behind Facebook.

Lawyers are very good for telling clients what they want to hear, and for taking their money in battles to "do what's right".

If these guys had any sense, they'd bail out of the case, fire the lawyers, and write a book about how totally awesome they are. Hell, pay ten million to have it promoted. Then spend the rest of their lives trying to recapture the magic or sitting on a beach with drinks with little umbrellas in them, whatever their choice.

I don't think they'll do that, though. There's a lot of pride and ego involved here.

notahacker• 16 years ago

I think it's also a case of wanting to "get back" at Zuckerberg for what they see as a betrayal. Being born extremely rich and not having a multi-billion dollar corporation to run gives you a lot of scope to waste your enemies' time and money.

andymatic• 16 years ago

They aren't familiar with not getting what they want.

dctoedt• 16 years ago

> Lawyers are very good for telling clients what they want to hear, and for taking their money in battles to "do what's right".

[rant]

Some lawyers indeed do that. And in a given case it may look like that's what's happening.

But lawyers are constrained by legal ethics rules, which really do require us to put our clients' interests above just about anything else:

1. Lawyers are required to be zealous advocates for our clients' causes. That's a universal feature of legal-ethics rules in the U.S., and AFAIK in most other countries too.

2. Once we take on a client representation in a given matter, we're not allowed to fire the client except in limited circumstances or with the client's agreement. If the client goes flaky, we may be stuck with him / her / them / it.

3. Lawyers can, should, and typically do advise clients about the potential downsides of a given course of action, including bad PR. But in the end, unless the client is asking us to do something illegal or unethical, it's very likely the client's call, and there may not be much we can do about it.

The foregoing can sometimes be a convenient excuse for lawyers to do unsavory stuff on behalf of their clients. But the alternative might be a system in which lawyers were allowed to bail out on their clients at will -- and in which people with unpopular causes were unable to get legal representation. I don't think many people would want that kind of system, especially when they realized that someday they might be the one who couldn't get a lawyer.

[/rant]

ot2• 16 years ago

Did anyone care about the Winklevoss twins before the movie?

weel• 16 years ago

As far as I can tell, yes. In particular, the people being sued by them presumably cared quite a bit.

ot2• 16 years ago

Of course they did, I was just asking about the rest of the world. The first settlement was in 2008, but the huge spike here http://www.google.com/trends?q=winklevoss&ctab=0&geo... coincides with the release of the movie.

lkrubner• 16 years ago

I would be extremely embarrassed if I had to go through life telling people: "I had one good idea back in 2003, but I had some trouble with the programmer who I never paid, and I could not recover from that, so I have now spent my whole life making a living by suing my former programmer. I've yet to have another good idea, or do anything else interesting with my life."

smackfu• 16 years ago

I'm sure it was not that bad until the movie came out.

hunterjrj• 16 years ago

"...or do anything else interesting with my life."

Except for this tiny competition they took part in one time. Nothing major. I think they call it the "Olympics" or something like that.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyler_Winklevoss

mturmon• 16 years ago

One piece of evidence of not-that-good ideas post-ConnectU is http://guestofaguest.com/ which is published by Cameron W.

grellas• 16 years ago

Will Facebook ever be rid of the Winklevoss twins?"

Yes, on the legal front, this is likely to end sooner rather than later at this point, as the appeal by the twins from the lower court judgment ordering that the settlement be enforced has not been well received by the panel hearing the appeal (see link, with my associated comment, from a couple of days ago to a story analyzing the judges' comments during the oral argument: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2096370).

I will restate here from my prior comment what the stakes are on this appeal:

"In my view, the last major legal cloud that hangs over Facebook is the appeal by ConnectU and the Winklevoss brothers of a federal court decision upholding a settlement between them and FB of their claims that Mr. Zuckerberg had allegedly stolen their ideas to form the company. With that settlement in place, those parties received what many considered a windfall ($20M cash and 1.2 shares of FB stock, originally valued at $45M and now estimated to be worth $150M). Should it be set aside, however, the settlement value of such claims today would be astronomical. Why? Because these claims (unlike those of Mr. Ceglia, who filed a claim nearly seven years after the fact claiming an "84% stake in Facebook") were timely brought and have overhung every round of financing that FB has done from the beginning. In other words, existing FB shareholders have at all times been aware, in making their investment, of the risk that they could potentially lose everything should ConnectU prevail in its claims to own the FB IP. That is a devastating outcome for FB shareholders, of course, but the claimants here (unlike Mr. Ceglia) cannot be accused of laches or foot-dragging in ways that make the timing of their claims inequitable and therefore unenforceable. Thus, should they get this settlement set aside, FB would be faced with years of future litigation during which a serious question mark would hang over the entire value of its company. Hence, no IPO; hence, a far higher cost of any financing down the road. The stakes are high in this case."

Money, then, would appear to be the main driving element here. By playing with house money, the twins stand to gain by continuing to leverage their legal threats. That is why this whole thing has taken on a Terminator-like quality. In the end, they will either run out of legal leverage or they will be paid off. Time will tell on which it will be but I doubt that they will back off gracefully regardless of any windfall they might have already received.

dstein2• 16 years ago

I really hope Facebook doesn't settle this time. I want to see this go to court and watch these guys lose the entire fortune that was dropped in their laps. It would be great if this lawsuit establishes in court, once and for all, that ideas are worth $0 and do not entitle current or former employers to anything. As far as I understand Mark Zuckerberg wasn't even an employee of the Winklevoss' which makes the whole thing a joke.

kno• 16 years ago

I'm afraid this brothers may lose all their new found money in legal fees. They signed the settlement, they should get over it. Take the money and get a life, hack something we want to use!

EGreg• 16 years ago

If they are outraged that Mark executed the idea instead of them, they they are implying that they're capable of starting a website like facebook and making it super-popular, like facebook.

Why don't they just take the money they won and do that with some other idea? There is plenty of stuff to do, as we all know on this board. It would look much better to everyone if they showed what they are capable of. Eduardo Saverin is funding some pretty interesting ventures. Otherwise it looks like they're admitting this was their one and only big idea.

VladRussian• 16 years ago

this is why stealing is bad. Compare with B.Gates for example who bought the DOS for 50K instead of stealing it.

Will Facebook ever be rid of the Winklevoss twins?

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