Founder Control
December 2010Someone we funded is talking to VCs now, and asked me how common it was for a startup's founders to retain control of the board after a series A round. He said VCs told him this almost never happened.Ten years ago that was true. In the past, founders rarely kept control of the board through a series A.
- ▪December 2010Someone we funded is talking to VCs now, and asked me how common it was for a startup's founders to retain control of the board after a series A round.
- ▪He said VCs told him this almost never happened.Ten years ago that was true.
- ▪In the past, founders rarely kept control of the board through a series A.
Paul Graham — Essays files mainly under blogs. We currently carry 219 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Paul Graham — Essays |
| Canonical URL | http://www.paulgraham.com/control.html |
| Publication time | Not provided by source |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-26T08:49:07.854Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-26T08:49:31.782Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. December 2010Someone we funded is talking to VCs now, and asked me how common it was for a startup's founders to retain control of the board after a series A round. He said VCs told him this almost never happened.Ten years ago that was true. In the past, founders rarely kept control of the board through a series A. The traditional series A board consisted of two founders, two VCs, and one independent member. More recently the recipe is often one founder, one VC, and one independent. In either case the founders lose their majority.But not always. Mark Zuckerberg kept control of Facebook's board through the series A and still has it today. Mark Pincus has kept control of Zynga's too.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Paul Graham — Essays.