An employee who exposed Rothenberg Ventures to the SEC

Interesting timing, I had just finished reading this Backchannel article regarding Rothenberg Ventures from September: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;backchannel.com&#x2F;mike-rothenbergs-vc-firm-was-young-splashy-and-loaded-with-cash-now-it-s-all-come-crashing-down-e76fa076c7c5#.gz51k7nld" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;backchannel.com&#x2F;mike-rothenbergs-vc-firm-was-young-s...</a><p>Just an excerpt, an example of what I&#x27;d imagine some of the unwise personal projects regard:<p>&quot;Most troublesome are questions about how Rothenberg managed investors’ money. Specifically, in 2015 he founded a virtual reality production company called River Studios to create virtual reality videos for the likes of Coldplay and Björk, funding it with $5 million from Rothenberg Ventures. Many investors say they did not know — nor was it disclosed in annual reports — that he was founding and funding his own business with their dollars, despite the fact that the investment was roughly 50 times the size of the seed investments the firm normally makes.&quot;

Good for him. That&#x27;s why we have whistleblower laws in the first place. Most of us have a lot to lose by doing the right thing: damaged job prospects may equate to a large future loss of earnings over your career. Still, history shows plenty of people have paid (and continue to pay) a far higher price than that.

Article doesn&#x27;t really support the headline. The sole argument they provide that there was any &quot;blowback&quot; was that one time he brought it up in a job interview and didn&#x27;t get a call back. Hardly enough to say your career prospects are some how wrecked because you exposed a blatant fraud.

In all seriousness, isn&#x27;t it best to secure your next position before going to the government or the investors? You have to assume that your job is over as you know it.

I have to say this isn&#x27;t surprising from my personal experience with Rothenberg. I attended their &quot;Founders Field Day&quot; event last year and it was the most surreal, over the top, &quot;Silicon Valley&quot; thing I have ever witnessed. They must not be in too hot of water though, as they&#x27;re holding another puppy petting&#x2F;VR party in the city this Friday.

So, where&#x27;s the blowback? I feel like half of the story is missing...

I don&#x27;t see anything coming out of this or the earlier exposes. They seem to be doing fine, and will continue to thrive. Viva Tech-Bros!

&gt; even renting out San Francisco’s AT&amp;T Park<p>Now I get the opening scene in Silicon Valley Season 2 Episode 1 where they&#x27;re at the baseball stadium.

&quot;That was February 2016. By July, Riordan says, he’d downloaded emails, financial reports, and other records from the network that he says showed the company’s namesake, Chief Executive Officer Mike Rothenberg, was using investor money to fund other projects he owned&quot;<p>That&#x27;s kind of troubling, depending upon the details.<p>If I hire someone and he starts fishing around on the servers that he has access to, looking to put together a case, that could easily be a violation of trust. I could maybe even see if the SEC had contacted him and asked him for information as an informant in something ongoing. But Riordan initiated this - and it wasn&#x27;t like the Uber example where Susan Fowler was exposing company culture information that was more public in the first place.<p>Granted, Rothenberg looks pretty dirty and I have personal experience with a CEO diverting company funds and priorities away from the supposed corporate mission. It&#x27;s no fun and I have sympathy for stopping him.<p>If I hire someone to do some server work, I want him to do the job I&#x27;m paying for - not spend my money trying to build a case against me.

This article didn&#x27;t do this person any favors.<p>Hired for web development, they go trawling through the network finding any insufficiently secured material they can access to appease their sense of justice (and have since used various emails of other people&#x27;s for media discussions to bolster their case, while ironically talking about email security -- ala &quot;defend against me&quot;). Then they continue working while acting as an agent of the government. Or such is what I take from this article.<p>As good as it seems that the company and &quot;frat&quot; brothers (always a wonderful word in these articles to prejudice the reader) were brought down, does this article give anyone any comfort about hiring this person?<p>To make it even worse (regarding the &quot;side with criminals&quot; nonsense), thus far nothing criminal has even been demonstrated. For instance a core contention is that they used management fees for separate investments. There is <i>nothing</i> illegal about that. Investors are partners of specific funds, and management fees are the fees <i>and profit to the management company</i> for running that fund. It just sounds like a shitty company shittily run, but running around exposing various emails that were arguably criminally accessed just smells really stinky.

If I found out that <i>someone I know</i> (friend, family member, ...) were being deceived by the company, I&#x27;d pass the info on to that person (not the government).<p>Otherwise, none of my business.<p>Of course, unless I&#x27;m in a position where I&#x27;m legally required, like an officer of the company, or accountant or whatever. As someone just doing in-house development or IT work or whatever, no way.<p>The litmus test for whistling is: is it my business to know this information? And if so, do I face penalties or a jail time if I don&#x27;t report it?<p>That guy shouldn&#x27;t even have been reading those e-mails, which were not for his eyes. Of course someone might not want to hire him; he sticks his nose where it doesn&#x27;t belong.<p>Suppose the company hadn&#x27;t done anything wrong? Will he reveal in future interviews, &quot;I was an <i>almost</i>-whistleblower at my former employer; working a simple web developer, I got into private executive memos that weren&#x27;t CC&#x27;d to me and luckily found no evidence of wrongdoing&quot;.