Wait, what? Isn’t this your company? Some people, especially in Sri Lanka, seem to think that WSO2 is “Sanjiva’s company” — in the sense that I own it. Well that’s not even remotely true and it never was! I am the
founder of it and owned 40% of it when we started. The way venture funded companies work is that your ownership percentage goes down as you sell more shares to bring in capital. (I explained how that works in
this talk.) As a result I now own a small percentage of the company (around 5%). In fact, all employees collectively own about 25% of WSO2 right now — and even a big part of my ownership is from option grants I received after the first 6 years so my 40% dwindled down way below 5% even. That’s normal as the expectation (hope?!) is that your small piece is now part of a much larger pie and therefore worth more. That certainly is the case for WSO2 —
Source :
https://medium.com/@sanjiva.weerawarana/time-for-me-to-move-on-from-wso2-7d626afca87c