Puzzles mARk DAnBuRG-WYLD
sharing the wealth
THIS STORY TOOk PLACE in my previous career, as a coder in a dot-com startup back in the mid-to-late-
1990s. The Internet was a simpler place in those times, consisting mainly of words rather than pictures. This
was before the now-common practice of digitally recording video and audio of one’s every waking moment,
uploading it via a mobile device, and watching the same from all of one’s friends. But it was still an exciting
time to be involved in high-tech enterprises, finding new and innovative ways to deliver content across this
new medium and trying to figure out ways to get people with deep pockets to pay you for developing new
mechanisms for selling dog food online.
Now the company I worked for
( www.myonlinedogfoodwebsite.com)
never was able to raise any venture
capital at all, which shows that venture
capitalists are not as dumb as you might
think. As a result, none of the people
working there ever got paid. Instead, we
got stock options.
But the CEO was both clever and greedy,
and he realized that he could gain a lot
of shares by asking everyone to vote on
reallocating them.
The company had a total of 130
people working there, and, to illustrate
what a non-hierarchical and progressive
organization it was, the CEO awarded
everyone exactly one share of stock.
Furthermore, there was a lockdown
guarantee (due to the failure to raise
any capital) that there would never be
another share issued—these 130 shares
were it, forever.
Of the 129 other employees, you could
assume that each would vote in favor of
any reallocation of shares that increased
his or her own ownership, and against
any re-allocation that took shares away
from him or her personally. If the vote
wouldn’t change an employee’s number
of shares, you could assume he or she
wouldn’t care, and would abstain.
Your puzzle is: How many shares
could the CEO obtain, and how many
votes did it take for him to obtain them?
Also, can you generalize to a startup with
n employees?
One more peculiarity of this being
a non-hierarchical and progressive organization was that everything, and I
mean every possible issue, was settled
by voting. And every single person had
one vote. We were entitled to our vote
regardless of whether or not we also
owned a share of the company. At the
beginning, of course, we all did have a
share each, but that changed shortly.
One final quirk: the CEO was the only
one who could call for a vote.
One day, the CEO decided that he
wanted to acquire as many shares as
he could. The other 129 of us had been
there long enough to realize that these
shares were unlikely ever to be worth
anything, and I personally would have
given him mine in exchange for a cup of
coffee (16-ounce non-fat latte with four
shots of espresso—thanks for asking).
SHu TTERSTOCk / BOnOTOm STuDIO
Solutions may be e-mailed to the
author at
cont.puzzles@gmail.com.
In order to make the solver list,
your solution must be received by
May 31, 2010.
Previous issue’s Puzzle
another Fine mess
The company I work for has recently
completed the acquisition of another
company, Misfortune Ltd., which hadn’t
been quite so prepared for the economic
downturn. This meant all normal work
was on hold for the usual months of due
diligence, meetings, bargaining, and rev-
elations. In spite of all that, there were
still a number of surprises that met us
once we started trying to move the ac-
quired policyholders onto my company’s
computer system.
I kept remembering something my
dad used to say to me about buying used
cars: “Why would you want to pay for
someone else’s problems?”
Of course, dad’s advice didn’t stop
me from driving a series of clunkers,
and it didn’t stop my CFO from buying
Misfortune.
By far, the most unusual situation we
came across was a custom life product
that I can only guess was a marketing
ploy gone horribly awry. Not a single
person still working at Misfortune would
confess to knowing how it had come
about. The scheme was as follows: Misfortune had issued a number of policies,
all with the same effective date. Starting
from that date, they accumulated a payout fund. On the first day, they credited
$1 to the fund. On the second day, they
credited $2 to the fund. Those of you
familiar with the old story of the chessboard and the rice might be worried at
this point, but you can relax—on day
three, they credited $3 to the fund. This
went on from the first day of the policies
until we acquired them, each day one
more dollar was credited to the fund than
had been on the previous day. However,
the fund didn’t accrue any interest.
The terms of the policy were that Misfortune would evenly distribute the fund
at an unspecified date to all surviving
policyholders as of the day of distribution. There were various guarantees and
protections, but that was the essence of it.
We could pick any date that we wished to
disperse the money, and then we would
be done with this crazy scheme.
