This is sort of arcane, but I am fascinated by two decisions that came out of Delaware this week from VC Laster and VC Glasscock.  They are remarkably similar in facts and result, but travel slightly different paths to get there.

The first case, Harris v. Harris, concerned a family corporation.  The mother was alleged to have systematically looted the company and – aware that a books-and-records action was likely to be filed by her children – forced through a merger with a shell New Jersey entity.  After the merger, all of the former shareholders of the old corporation now held identical interests in the new corporation, which was the same in every respect, except for the new state of organization.

The second case, In re Orbit/FR Stockholders Litigation, concerned a corporation with private equity investors.  The controller, a French corporation, was alleged to have systematically looted the company, and then effectuated a cash squeeze out merger in order to avoid any potential claims for breach of fiduciary duty.

Because in both cases, the minority stockholders no longer held shares in the looted entity – they held shares in the reorganized entity in Harris, and cash in…

Couple of things this week.

First, the FTC proposed a new rule that would bar employers from requiring employees to sign noncompetes that extend post-employment.  It’s a very broad proposal; it applies to “a contractual term between an employer and a worker that prevents the worker from seeking or accepting employment with a person, or operating a business, after the conclusion of the worker’s employment with the employer,” and includes “a contractual term that is a de facto non-compete clause because it has the effect of prohibiting the worker from seeking or accepting employment with a person or operating a business after the conclusion of the worker’s employment with the employer.”

The sole exception is for “a non-compete clause that is entered into by a person who is selling a business entity or otherwise disposing of all of the person’s ownership interest in the business entity, or by a person who is selling all or substantially all of a business entity’s operating assets, when the person restricted by the non-compete clause is a substantial owner of, or substantial member or substantial partner in, the business entity at the time the person enters into the non-compete clause.”  A substantial owner…

Everyone remember the WeWork debacle?  One interesting aspect is that although Adam Neumann is often mentioned in the same breath as Elizabeth Holmes and – these days – Samuel Bankman-Fried, Neumann was never charged with fraud, despite ballyhooed announcements of investigations.  If anything, that’s one of the more amazing things about the story: Neumann was able to incinerate billions of dollars while apparently explaining exactly what he planned to do and how he would do it.

Well, not exactly.  As I blogged in March 2021, one set of WeWork investors brought fraud claims against Neumann and other WeWork officers, namely former shareholders of a company called Prolific Interactive, which WeWork acquired for a combination of cash and WeWork stock.  The former Prolific shareholders claim that they were misled about the value of WeWork stock and sold their company too cheaply.  And, when they filed their complaint, I blogged that I didn’t understand why they had chosen to bring claims solely under Section 10(b) of the federal Exchange Act.  Section 10(b) is a very plaintiff-unfriendly statute.  Among other things, 10(b) claims are subject to the heightened pleading requirements of the PSLRA, and the scope of prohibited behavior is actually quite…

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about how the most striking aspect of the FTX saga was the lack of due diligence by FTX’s equity backers – and how proud they were of that fact, before everything came crashing down.

This week, we got a little more color on that, in the form of the SEC’s complaint against Samuel Bankman-Fried (like everyone else, for ease of reference, I’ll call him “SBF”).  The least surprising thing about the case is that the SEC focused not on the fraud perpetuated on crypto asset traders, but on the fraud perpetuated by SBF on investors in FTX.  That’s because the SEC only has jurisdiction over fraud committed in connection with securities trading, and it’s not always clear whether a particular crypto asset is, or is not, a security.  To sue SBF over fraud perpetuated on FTX customers, the SEC would have to perform the Howey test on an asset-by-asset basis for everything the customers traded – not exactly a feasible undertaking.  So, the SEC took the low-hanging fruit and sued to vindicate the rights of the stockholders in FTX.

Just one teensy problem.  Here are examples of the fraud, taken from…

A former shareholder of Anaplan recently filed a lawsuit against several of its former officers and directors, alleging a variety of fiduciary breaches in connection with the company sale to Thoma Bravo (“TB”).

As you may recall from news reports at the time – or Matt Levine’s column – Anaplan signed a deal to sell itself to TB at $66 per share.  Then, the bottom fell out of the market, and suddenly that looked like a very generous price.  TB was stuck, though, until Anaplan screwed up by approving a bunch of new bonus payments to executives that violated the merger agreement’s ordinary course covenant.  That gave TB an excuse to threaten to walk away unless Anaplan agreed to a lower deal price, and the merger ultimately closed at $63.75 – a reduction of $400 million.

Pentwater Capital, a hedge fund with a substantial stake in Anaplan, is now suing, alleging that compensation committee directors, and the officers involved with the awards, breached their duties of loyalty and committed waste, and that the officers – including the company CEO, who was also Chair – acted with gross negligence. 

(Side note: to distinguish the CEO’s behavior in his capacity as…

When it comes to FTX, I’ll let the crypto people talk about the implications for that space generally, and I’m sure we all have our opinions on Samuel Bankman-Fried’s conduct – both before the collapse, and his endless apology tour afterwards – but what will live on for me is not any of that, but the 14,000 word hagiography that Sequoia had published on its website until very recently; they took it down after the bankruptcy declaration, though of course you can’t erase anything from the internet.

Sequoia has gotten a lot of flak for it not only for the fawning coverage, but because it revealed that Bankman-Fried actually was playing a video game during his pitch meeting.  More than that, after FTX raised $1 billion in its B round, it apparently held a “meme round” of financing, and raised $420.69 million from 69 investors.

Such revelations have inspired a lot of criticisms of the due diligence process today, not only by Sequoia but also by other FTX investors like Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.

But what really stood out to me not just was the evidence of due diligence failure, but the fact that Sequoia intentionally, by their own…

Look there are two massive business stories right now – FTX and Twitter – and I have worked very, very hard to avoid learning anything about crypto, so Twitter it is.

Eventually there will be writing – so much writing – about all of this (me and everyone else), but as I type, it’s being reported that there has been a massive exodus of Twitter employees who largely do not want to work for Elon Musk; Musk, in a paranoid fear of sabotage, locked all employees out of the offices until Monday before demanding they all fly to San Francisco for a meeting on Friday, and engineers responsible for critical Twitter systems left.  Most of us who are actually on Twitter are waiting for one big bug to take the system down (I’ve set up an account, by the way, at Mastodon).  And maybe that won’t happen – maybe Musk will eventually turn things around – but he’s certainly made things a lot more difficult for himself in the interim.

I’ll save my bigger lesson musings for other formats, but for now, I’ll make a minor point: the Delaware Court of Chancery did not, of course…