no ideas. He wanted to change the company’s name. This was a product that
was in use in 10,000 sites worldwide—so at least 10,000 programmers knew it
as the ArsDigita Community System. There were thousands and thousands of
people who had come to our face-to-face seminars. There were probably
100,000 people worldwide who knew of us, because it was all free. And he said,
“We should change the company name because, when we hire these salespeople
and they’re cold-calling customers, it will be hard for the customer to
write down the name; they’ll...

won’t have to do that; we’ll hire project managers to keep the deadlines.” And
then they hired these people who, still to this day, I have never figured out what
they were supposed to do. They were called “client services.” They weren’t the
project managers. I think they were supposed to keep the customer happy.
The new management hired all these people but, if you asked, “Who’s
responsible for making sure that this project, overall, makes money for the
company and who has an incentive to ensure that it’s done on time and the...

a majority shareholder.”
I said, “But these guys told me that I have no power because they control
the board, three to two, and it doesn’t matter what anyone else says.”
He said, “Yes, but the shareholders elect the board. Just have a shareholders’
meeting and elect yourself and your cofounders (or whoever else you
want) to the board, and these guys will be back to their two board seats, which
is what they bargained for. They have a minority investment. They bargained
for two board seats and veto power over certain transactions...

then we elected a couple of our founders to the board. So now we had a threeto-
two board majority.
Livingston: Where did you physically do this?
Greenspun: We did it by letter actually. We did it in the lawyers’ office downtown
at Edwards and Angell.
I knew that they wouldn’t like this, and I wanted to keep things as orderly as
possible, so I called up the old CEO—whom I think we had elected COO, so
we had demoted him to chief operating officer and kicked him of the board—
and...

they had a case that really couldn’t be won, since they were minority shareholders.
Let’s say you have one share of IBM and you go to the Delaware court
and you say, “I want to control IBM; I feel like I’m entitled.” There’s really
nothing holy left in America: religion’s not holy, the family isn’t holy, marriage
isn’t holy, but the only thing that’s really left that is holy to Americans is ownership.
And that’s what the courts are there for. They are there to preserve the
rights of owners of things. So when...