
Drew Houston Joins Facebook Board of Directors - minimaxir
https://about.fb.com/news/2020/02/drew-houston-joins-facebook-board/
======
mikorym
I know the point here is not to call out FB in useless arguments, but one
thing I think is maybe fair to contribute is that FB groups [1] and pages have
come to be the really useful parts of the ecosystem (notwithstanding
Whatsapp). This also poses a problem that other sites (especially late 90's
sites) have had, which is that they can lose their data at any time.

[1] A good example is the groups about the Kruger national park, about snakes,
and about other animals in Southern Africa.

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thinkloop
What would someone typically be paid, if anything, to join the board?

~~~
thesausageking
It has to be disclosed, so you can look it up in the SEC filings. When Ken
Chenault was added in 2017, his offer was $350k per year, with $50k in cash
and $300k in RSUs. Jeff Zients received the same offer in 2018, except he got
an additional $20k for being on the audit committee[1].

So, to answer your question, $350-370k / year.

[0] [https://content.edgar-
online.com/ExternalLink/EDGAR/00013268...](https://content.edgar-
online.com/ExternalLink/EDGAR/0001326801-18-000032.html?hash=b50c564befd7f2b257d587f6f2ebb32789c239bfbe4448eef39b00f0e83a9d27&dest=FB-03312018XEX104_HTM#FB-03312018XEX104_HTM)

[1] [https://content.edgar-
online.com/ExternalLink/EDGAR/00013268...](https://content.edgar-
online.com/ExternalLink/EDGAR/0001326801-18-000057.html?hash=e3867cb34053f157c6221be99d1590e2ae5d77d3f053df8a091da8462f490be0&dest=FB-06302018XEX101_HTM#FB-06302018XEX101_HTM)

~~~
nostromo
While that sounds like easy money -- it's worth noting that boards are quite
regularly sued, and sued personally, for breach of fiduciary duty, in class
action lawsuits.

So there's some risk and potential cost involved with taking these positions.

Edit: thanks for the reply below!

~~~
jmchuster
> easy money

Kind of a strange thing to say 350k to work as a board member is easy money,
when the requirement to become a board member in the first place is to be a
CEO who was previously being paid tens of millions of dollars a year.

~~~
wheelerwj
There is no requirement to have formerly been a CEO. There are no requirements
at all for sitting on a board.

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sub7
Set up your Seafile/Nextcloud/Owncloud asap and get your data off these twits'
servers. It will soon be:

1) Scraped and analyzed to generate advertising IDs 2) Backdoored to any law
enforcement back channel request

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asadlionpk
is Dropbox too big to be acquired (by Facebook)? Can this mean that they are
going to?

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fyp
I wonder if dropbox might have more photos data than facebook. People only
share a small subset of all the photos they have taken and have backed up. I
can see that being valuable. Otherwise I am not seeing why they would want to
acquire them.

~~~
est31
Facebook is in the ad and data selling business (although they of course
insist on selling ads only, no data. don't believe them). People put tons of
sensitive data into Dropbox backed up accounts like financial documents
(financial plans, tax calculations, etc), medical letters, correspondence with
employers, holiday plans, etc. Tons of entities would pay lots of money for
access to that kind of data.

~~~
Jamwinner
Would anyone like to explaon why they disagree here? I see this being greyed
out without any rebuttal. This seems SOP for facebook lately.

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personamb
I'm pretty surprised, and a little disappointed by, this addition. The FB
board is already a who's who of "Silicon Valley Standard Perspectives".

As Facebook's biggest challenges continue to be about the unexpected
consequences of the breadth of its technology, Drew doesn't seem to add any
perspective that I'd expect the board to be missing right now.

~~~
aprao
Given Drew runs a very privacy-focused profitable business, I'd imagine he'd
have at least a slightly different perspectives on things.

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tl
My response is Condoleezza Rice [1] followed by Prism [2] followed by
hysterical laughter.

[1] [http://www.drop-dropbox.com/](http://www.drop-dropbox.com/)

[2]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_\(surveillance_program\))

~~~
dang
> bashing Dropbox is HN-suicide

That's not true, and why would you go to the trouble of making a footnote
about a six-year-old thread yet skip providing the link?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7566069](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7566069)

grellas' comment has 270+ replies, and HN's software currently paginates
threads at 250 comments. That is purely for performance reasons, and I can't
wait to be able to turn it off. If you go to the subsequent pages, there are
many other top-level comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7566069&p=2](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7566069&p=2)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7566069&p=3](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7566069&p=3)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7566069&p=4](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7566069&p=4)

grellas' comment is at the top because the ranking algorithm put it there;
many of his comments have gotten upvoted heavily over the years. Moderators
didn't do any of that.

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rkagerer
Something about the guy who has the keys to all my cloud-synced files
associating with Zuckerberg makes me queasy.

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ipsum2
Sort of off-topic, what do board members of large (tech) companies do? What
value do they provide?

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mathattack
Main job is to represent the shareholders’ financial interests by hiring,
monitoring and firing the CEO.

~~~
rrss
Follow-up question: what is the job of the board when the CEO has the majority
of the voting shares?

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ymolodtsov
They still have social power. No company wants its entire board to resign at
once, even if they only care about the share price. So the board can use that
as a leverage.

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adtac
So the larger the board, the more power Zuckerberg has, as it's more and more
unlikely that everybody resigns. Especially if he starts adding friends.

Dual-class shares should be banned IMO. I know that the people buying $FB do
it aware of the stock's limited power, but I don't understand why this is
allowed to perpetuate. You're essentially buying shares without any
representation. If I own 10% of a company's net worth, I should have 10%
voting rights.

With great power comes great responsibility. Unless you're the CEO of a large
tech company.

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fragmede
Shares aren't being bought for representation, and haven't been for some time
now - maybe even as far back as the 1980's when hostile takeovers were more
common. I, as an individual, own FB because I think I'll be able to sell later
on when I need liquid cash, for more than I'd get parking it in a savings
account. There are other reasons to buy stock, but I know I'm not alone in
this reasoning. As an individual, there's just no way for me to own 10% or
even 1% of Facebook, who's market cap is some $580 billion.

~~~
ValentineC
I'm guessing most stockholders (whose shares aren't held in custodian
accounts) would have access to a company's Annual General Meeting, where
individuals who are charismatic enough could possibly influence the going-ons.

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erobbins
What a joke... floundering company CEO added to successful company board.
Really? Dropbox management is atrocious, they succeeded in spite of
themselves.

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sharker8
Its clear this is so zuck can learn about cloud storage given that was his
backup plan in the early days. He wanted to make a cloud storage company as I
recall if fb went under. Now with fb workplace not doing super hot he wants to
learn more about b2b and enterprise solutions.

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donjigweed
[https://twitter.com/EricNewcomer/status/1224446581513940999](https://twitter.com/EricNewcomer/status/1224446581513940999)

[https://twitter.com/EricNewcomer/status/1224448902629249024](https://twitter.com/EricNewcomer/status/1224448902629249024)

[https://twitter.com/EricNewcomer/status/1224450329673994245](https://twitter.com/EricNewcomer/status/1224450329673994245)

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claudeganon
Guess I’m finally going to have to cancel my Dropbox account. No one who would
work on Facebook’s board can have any kind of scruples.

~~~
packetslave
guess you'll also have to stop using Paypal, Airbnb, IBM, or anything from
Procter & Gamble.

~~~
claudeganon
I think the only one of those things I use is PayPal because of millennial
reliance on Venmo. But I would love to stop!

