A long-time friend of mine is facing real difficulties right now over at the site he helped create -- deviantART.com.
It's almost a text-book example of business men vs. engineers on the surface. The idea guys, the founders, the visionaries versus the suits, money men, and biz guys.
In these situations, the biz guys almost always win because they are the ones who have put together all the legal paperwork for the company and can make sure they are legally unassailable by founders who, too often, agree via a handshake or via email.
At Stardock, I founded the company alone. I was both the engineer and the biz guy. I don't have to contend with a board of directors or shareholder votes. This comes up on occasion when some infuriated customer or user sends a nastygram to our customer service department because I've told them off or whatever. Typically, companies don't reach the size of Stardock without investors and business developers. I would be the first to admit that we'd probably be a lot more successful financially today if we had a few suits helping to run things. But next time I'm tempted, I'll remind myself of what Jark has gone through.
We now enter the realm of raw speculation. But back in 2000, a couple of guys had an idea -- to create an art community called deviantART. It would be a bit different than other sites in that the focus of the site would be about the artists and not the users. This was a radical idea at the time. When Stardock created WinCustomize.com the focus of the site was on the users first and the artists second. It was assumed, with I think good reason at the time, that there's a lot more users than artists. But deviantART believed that there were millions and millions of would-be artists out there and no central place for them to congregate.
As a result, deviantART automatically gave each artist their own sub-domain and encouraged them to interact with one another. For instance, mine is frogboy2.deviantart.com. The primary visionary in all this, from what I recall, was a 28 year old visionary named Scott Jarkoff. With his friend "Matteo" they coded the basics of the site.
The site grew at a steady rate until they teamed up with a very young guy named Angelo who was, I believe, around 19 years old at the time. From what I've seen, he is a gifted young business man. And he was able to provide the site what amounted to unlimited bandwith. He also brought in guys who created a network infrastructure to support much higher traffic. The site was relaunched and quickly grew from being an Alexa ranked site of around 6,000 to an Alexa ranked site of 800 (800th most popular in the world). Today it's in the top 500.
Both guys deserve immense credit for what they've done. But there is always the question of ultimate control. At the end of the day, one guy is going to call the shots at any company. And that guy became Angelo (Spyed). Over time, he came to control not just the behind the scenes business but slowly emerged as the front-man for the company. As a result, he tended, especially in the media, to get the lion's share of credit for deviantART even though it was really mostly Jark who had the vision and overall idea and most importantly, the elbow greese to put the site in a position to go to the next level. Jark and Matteo created deviantART. Angelo took it to the next level.
A lot of the issue today has to do with a basic disagreement -- what was Angelo's involvement at the beginning? Can he really be considered a co-founder? That's not for me to say. But I don't think it's accurate to put Angelo on the same level as Jark and Matteo. To me, the issue is simple -- remove Jark and would there have been a deviantART? The answer, I believe, is no. Take Angelo out and there's still a deviantART albeit a much smaller, niche site.
Stardock today is a multi-million dollar company. But if some big time business guy came on and took over as CEO and took Stardock to being a multi-billion dollar company, would it be right to call him the founder? After all, if Stardock were a $10 billion company, then of how much significance are the days when the company's grosses were measured in the low millions range? Is that time really significant next to the billion-dollar verison?
How you answer that is probably similar to how one would look at the deviantART situation. deviantART today brings in around 20 million unique visitors per month. Once Angelo took over, the site went from being a 300k uniques per month to a 3 million uniques per month within a year. How significant is the time when the site was really little more than a niche art site with some cool ideas?
I'm an engineer so I take things literally. Jark and Matteo founded deviantART and Angelo made it a business success. Jark's motivation was probalby doing something unique, cool, and interesting and his initial desired reward comes in the form of kudos, acclaimations, and glory (for lack of a better word). Hence, I suspect that that what stings Jark more than the money is that Spyed (Angelo) seems to have rewritten things such that he was the visionary and driving force behind the site rather than Jark. As a result, Angelo's in the position to reap both the financial benefits and the glory of the site.
Don't underestimate glory. I confess that I myself worry more about "the community" than making "big bucks" very often. Money is merely a score-card, recognition matters more to me and I suspect Jark is much the same. Perhaps from Jark's standpoint, Spyed is attempting to get money and recognition for things that he hasn't warranted said recognition.
I think we'll know more over the coming weeks. In the meantime, I guess I'll take solace in the words of my wife "See, it may a bit of a bummer not to have partners to have helped build the business but you don't have to worry about someone usurping me." Well, not for a high price-tag anyway. 