Resident Cheeser
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Apr 5, 2022
Powerleveling a bit but I have done corporate contract negotiations so I know a lot more about this than Nick. When a company is negotiating, it cannot ever act in the way that two people can (a divorce, etc. can be "friendly" in its terms but something like this will not be, ever). It doesn't matter if the CEO is best friends with the person we are negotiating with, or if I'm best friends with the guy's lawyer and agent. This doesn't mean that you can't get along well and be smiling every step of the way, you absolutely can have incredibly productive negotiations – and that rapport goes a long way in the negotiation. But you have to have both parties at the table first.I listened to Crowder's initial response about the contract, followed by Nick's coverage of Jeremy Boreing's response, and I'm siding with Nick on this, for the most part, regarding his take to Boreing's response.
Boreing kept on saying he is friends with Crowder, but then sends an offer sheet that he would send to a relative nobody like Shapiro's Zoomer lookalike -- that would be insulting right off the bat from such a longtime "friend". And if you know he's going to have a huge problem with the penalties regarding demonetization, which you say you'd negotiate out immediately, then why put it in there in the first place, other than to hope he doesn't notice so that you can screw him with those? Crowder is arguably bigger than anyone at the Daily Wire, and has a loyal audience, which would most likely give a decent initial return on investment. You're going to own everything he does while working for you, but you want him to bear the production costs and a healthy amount of the risk, while hoping to penalize him for things you know will come to fruition to mitigate the risk you're purchasing? I would tell them to start over, as well. Boreing also kept on going back to the investment they would have to make to support Crowder, but a lot of what he was pointing to (infrastructure, marketing staff, social media management) already exists at the company, or most of the heavy lifting is done by other services (YouTube, Facebook, Rumble, etc, etc.). Why harp on it like you have to hire a thousand more employees just to handle Crowder's addition to your lineup? He started to sound like a communist by the 100th time he harped on having to share the pain if he Crowder fails. No, Jeremy, you buy the risk with the hope of great profit from a very desirable pickup. Crowder's there to deliver his audience, and it's not his risk once you purchase the show.
The offer sheet was intended to start a negotiation, nothing in it is final. Telling them to start their offer over from scratch is more of a faux-pas for a "friend" than an even more aggressive offer sheet would have been. I would personally find it offensive if we were ever told to restart our offer from scratch, but I would never get offended by an outrageous counteroffer.
What Nick clearly doesn't understand (understandably, as he has never been involved in a negotiation like this, and hasn't ever practiced this type of law) is that DW has to share the pain because they employ several hundred people, and if they don't make money on the deal, there are a lot of jobs that could be put on the line. Nick has never been in a situation involving any corporate duties. That's why negotiations aren't treated as deals between friends, when there are huge knock-on effects.
Crowder is not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, and it seems the same is the case with Nick. Every calculation he made about Crowder's potential current revenue and membership numbers was pulled entirely from his ass and lacks any basis in reality. If you read the contract you will see that only their special commissioned content remains owned by them if/when he leaves. Rekieta didn't understand this part either. The production cost clause is standard. The social media stuff is pretty standard too, and actually generous with excluding all his big platforms from any oversight by them. Everything that Nick sees as an insurmountable obstacle or cause for great offense is standard negotiating practice that would have been resolved in about five seconds after both parties got together. He needs to stop simping for Crowder and go take some CLE credits.