AI Weekly Malaysia

Dennis Crowley, Foursquare's co-founder and former CEO, wrote a blog post saying investors received no returns from Infillion's acquisition of the location-data platform last month at an undisclosed price, citing an angel investor's post to infer that neither preferred nor common stockholders got value. Foursquare had raised over $411 million per PitchBook, ran consecutive years above $100 million in revenue after pivoting to enterprise, brought in a private equity firm in 2019, and installed the banker who led that raise as CEO in 2021; the consumer app shut down in 2024. Crowley blamed the outcome on that management transition and apologized to roughly 1,600 former employees over 17 years.

Why: This is a concrete case of an acquisition that reportedly paid nothing to equity holders even after a business hit $100M+ revenue years, which is the scenario anyone accepting startup options should model: ask for the liquidation preference stack and run the payout waterfall at a low exit price, not just the headline valuation. If you are hiring or being hired in Malaysia or elsewhere with equity as part of comp, treat 'acquired' as meaningless until you know where common stock sits behind preferred and any PE liquidation preference.

In a Wednesday filing released alongside Meta's Q3 earnings, Meta disclosed a new stock incentive plan under which CEO Mark Zuckerberg commits to staying in California for at least eight years, explicitly framed as offsetting the burden of higher taxes if Proposition 40 — California's billionaires tax — passes on Election Day, Nov. 3. The article notes Zuckerberg is the sixth-richest person in the world and, with Nvidia's Jensen Huang, one of only two centibillionaire tech CEOs still living in California, while Elon Musk and Michael Dell are in Texas and Jeff Bezos' primary residence is elsewhere.

Why: There is no concrete action here for a Malaysian developer, data learner, or early-stage SaaS founder: it is a US state tax-policy and executive-compensation story with no product, pricing, API, or platform change attached. The only transferable detail is that Meta used a disclosed equity vehicle to price a founder's location commitment against a ballot measure — relevant if you are literally structuring founder comp or entity location around tax risk, which almost no one in this audience is.