
Ask HN: Is this normal VC behavior? - needuradvices
Two years ago, a VC found my HN account and emailed me and we developed a friendship in US. The VC is from Hong Kong and has had a couple of small exits (under $50 million USD) in the early 2000s. In 2015, he suggested that we work together on a product, with him taking care of the business side of things and me writing the MVP. He told me that he had contact at firm X where he would show the demo and raise money.<p>So after a month of working on MVP, things started to move more slowly. Throughout the year, we would huddle for a bit at his place and long periods where I wouldn&#x27;t hear anything. He was on vacation while I was working on the MVP. This was in March. Many months would go with just &quot;waiting on person Y at firm X&quot; and then summer came. He says that he wants to put his 22 year old daughter who recently graduated as CEO and says he will mentor her and says we would work good together. I found it odd.<p>It&#x27;s august now, nothing has changed and now he has some family matters to attend and he needs to delay the meet until November where it would be optimal for him to make the trip back to HK where firm X is. So more months follow with silence until November arrives.<p>When I ask if he demo&#x27;d the MVP or not I get a bit confused by his answer because he blamed a small one off bug that wasn&#x27;t super critical (it&#x27;s an MVP for christ&#x27;s sake) as a reason for not showing the demo.<p>I did some googling and he is known in HK circles but I discovered through offshoreleaks.org that he has multiple shell companies setup in British Virgin Islands with his daughter as a shareholder presumably from his exits. His buyer was a firm working for US military (I&#x27;m personally against helping defense industry)<p>Now he’s excited again by my new idea and wants to work on it together. I am hesitant. Again he wants me to go to HK and insits on Chinese market which I’m not excited about.
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paulgrimes1
Do you have any contracts/legally binding agreements in place with him?

If not, take the code and walk.

If so, hit up a lawyer about exiting the agreements - there are circumstances
where you can regain control of the code (and company) based on his lack of
due care to sufficiently promote the product as part of his role within the
agreement.

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needuradvices
> Do you have any contracts/legally binding agreements in place with him?

Nothing on paper or agreement whatsoever. I honestly feel like I'm being led
on blindly and have no say in how the business runs.

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paulgrimes1
Take your code and walk.

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spitfire
Something is fishy. Make sure you both retain all physical control (you keep
the source code and run the servers or heroky keys) and legal rights.

He gets to earn way to equity, he doesn't get it by default.

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needuradvices
I have access to all the servers and source code, domain, corporation. He's
suggesting we both incorporate in HK and use the banking there...which I don't
like because _I want to pay taxes just like everybody else because it 's the
fair thing to do_.

This is just one of the many things we disagree on....

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staticautomatic
The only good answer to this question is "Talk to a lawyer"

