When I was a kid, I read every Roald Dahl book. And with the exception of Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (which is up there with Godfather III on the list of sequels that never should have been), his books remain among my very favorites today. So it made me sad that some people who are probably less than half the writer he was could change his work without his permission.

When I read the news I thought, I can’t believe his estate signed off on that. But then I remembered that his estate sold the rights to his work to Netflix who said at the time “As we bring these timeless tales to more audiences in new formats, we’re committed to maintaining their unique spirit…”

Yeah but, Netflix doesn’t really care about Dahl’s legacy. Rather, the company wants to make popular content with other people’s intellectual property (because it's quicker to buy than build) that attracts and retains large audiences and then amortize the cost of that content over a far-too-long period of time in order to appear more profitable than it really is.

I digress…

Based on what I’ve read about Dahl’s heirs who sold out to Netflix, I don’t know that they care much about what happens to the author’s stories. Or maybe they do and in that case I apologize for judging. But the lesson is that when you sell, what you sold is sold and it’s not yours anymore.

To wit…

Barstool Sports is a thing, described on Wikipedia as “an American blog website…that produces content on sports and pop culture.” (Let’s ignore the fact that “blog website” is redundant. After all, this is from Wikipedia, a website that once tried to block me for trying to add crudites to its canonical list of hors d'oeuvres despite the fact that crudites is absolutely an hors d’oeuvres.)

Anyhow…

Barstool Sports is never without controversy and after its most recent controversy founder Dave Portnoy said he had to reluctantly fire someone at the request of PENN Entertainment, the publicly traded gambling company that acquired Barstool. Subsequently responding (with frequent use of the eff word) to people who accused him of “selling out,” Portnoy said he absolutely did sell out because selling out, he said, is “what you do when you’re an entrepreneur.”

There’s a lot to unpack here. 

Is the point of starting a business to eventually sell out? Sure, it’s great to get bigger and take on partners, but I don’t know that doing so should require compromising one’s values (let’s also leave aside the merits of the “values” related to either of these specific controversies). 

But should you pick your partners wisely? If you sell out and money is your only consideration, then you likely will end up in business with people who may decide to do things differently from how you might do them on your own or at the very least are optimizing for something else.

Is that problematic? Not if you’re at peace with your decision and understand what you are doing and why. Portnoy, for example, seems to understand what he signed up for.

Yet if all you care about is controlling your own destiny, then the answer is never sell anything. That’s because the only person who will always act like you would is you and ownership is ultimately what enables someone to call the shots. 

Or if you do decide to take the money, recognize that things will be different. How different, of course, depends on who you take the money from.

– By Tim Hanson

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