
Originally Posted by
rum dick
any chance youd post the whole story about the contract negotiations? would love to hear about the crazy terms and conditions micon and martha tried to get added to the agreement and their arguments for said terms and conditions (like how they tried to justify them and what they said when you turned them down, etc). and also how yall arrived at the buyout amount.
The whole story is much less exciting than you're probably picturing.
Basically I wrote the contract using my best Finklestein impression, and shipped it over to Micon to sign. He handed it to Martha, who made a bunch of changes and shipped it back.
While I accepted a few of the changes, the ones that really bothered me were punitive in nature. Basically she inserted a lot of terms saying, "If Druff does X, then Micon no longer has to keep to term Y." So basically there were punishments inserted for various behaviors, and many of them were subjective and would be hard for me to disprove.
For example, I remember one of them involved me using the
dandruff@donkdown.com e-mail (something Micon agreed to keep live for 2 years) for anything "officially" representing Donkdown. I was happy to sign that I wasn't going to pretend to be part of DD anymore (why would I, anyway?), but I wasn't going to agree to penalties if they claimed that I did it. All it would take would be some fabricated story that I was using the e-mail address to pretend I was still affiliated with DD, and then they would have justification to break terms of the contract. No fucking way I was going for that.
Even worse, there was nothing punitive against Micon in the contract for breaking terms on his side. So basically they wanted me to sign something where there were punishments for me breaking my side of the agreement, but no punishment against Micon for breaking his.
Just to be sure I wasn't crazy, I actually took the Martha-revised contract to an attorney friend of my dad's. The guy wasn't willing to do free legal work for me, but he was willing to look it over and see if he thought it was full of shit. He instantly pointed out the punitive stuff as inequitable, and told me I would be a fool if I signed it.
So I re-modified it, removed the punitive stuff, and told Micon that I would only sign if that stuff was out. He reluctantly agreed, but more just to have the whole thing out of his hair. He didn't admit I was right about it.
Regarding the lowball $1200 figure, I knew I was getting screwed, but I just wanted out. What was most important to me at the time was that, upon my exit, Micon wouldn't "relax" the rules and allow various trolls to plaster my family's info up there everywhere. Basically I wanted any personal info related to me and my family to be 100% off limits once I left the site. So I decided I was willing to give up some money in order to incentivize Micon to agree.
Micon admitted on the phone to me that $1200 was a LOL figure for 26.4% of the site. Mind you, the site was making about $1000 per month profit at the time, and Micon believed that my departure would only make things better (so he never argued that my leaving would devalue it). I pointed out to him that it would take less than 6 weeks to make back the $1200 he would pay me, and what a severe undervalue that was. His response was pretty much, "Yeah, but that's all I can afford now, and I can't even afford that."
Even worse, the money took months to receive, and I only got it after I pressured him.
So I actually sold him my 26.4% on credit, which again shows how much I wanted out.
The contract did have terms which allowed me to void the sale if he didn't both pay me 100% of DD profits until the $1200 was met, AND get the entire thing done within 6 months. That is, he was required to not keep a penny of DD profits until I was fully paid, and that even if DD failed to profit, he still owed it within 6 months.
I found out by keeping track of the site's sponsors that he was making money, and still wasn't paying me. I was furious when I learned that the money went toward buying DD trucker caps to sell people, which was against the agreement. (He wasn't allowed to use any of the profits to reinvest in or enhance the site until I was paid.)
After a lot of pressure, he agreed to ship me the money, and on the Wells Fargo statement, it said "SNAPPING U OFF CLEAN" in the descriptor.
This actually meant more than you might realize. Up until I demanded the money after I received nothing for a few months (and found he was reinvesting the site's profits in hats), Micon was under the delusion that we were still friends despite all that had happened. When I was refusing to let him worm out of paying me immediately upon finding that out, he felt like I was an insensitive jerk, and told me he wanted nothing to do with me anymore. Obviously I didn't care, as I felt our friendship ended as soon as I was forced out of DD.
Laughably, he was even mad at me for "birding his sponsors", and by that he meant that I was watching closely which sponsors he had and how much money he was making. He didn't accuse me of contacting any of them about this, but rather was mad that I kept track of the situation and caught him breaking our agreement.
So he sent me the money he owed, and the "SNAPPING U OFF CLEAN" was in reference to the fact that he was snapping me off from his life.