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I woke up every morning for the next few months unsure if I should hold my shares or sell them. It wasn't that I was wondering, like I would with a normal stock, if VA Linux would go up or down. This was a friends-and-family stock. There were emotional consequences I could barely understand, since I didn't even understand what the company did, no matter how many business articles I read about it, written by people who clearly also didn't understand what it did. Was the point of John's gift to give me an instant windfall? If so, I should cash out and buy a less embarrassing car. Or would selling make him feel like I didn't have faith in his vice-presidential abilities? The more I thought about it, selling my stock seemed like it was against the whole point of friends-and-family shares, which was to bring people together. What I never thought about was how John could even find out what I did with my shares.
Linux became an incredibly popular open-source operating system. VA, however, must never have caught on. Because just a year later, VA Linux was trading at less than $10 a share. It changed its name in 2001 to VA Software and then to SourceForge. It's now Geeknet, whose business plan seems to be paying people to write articles. Which I personally know is a horrible business plan.
Still, I held my stock until two years ago, when the brokerage house sent me a letter saying they were going to have to start charging me for holding an account with such a low balance. So I sold it. I never told John Hall about it, but I hope he understands. You can't put a value on friendship. I want the people I spent the day with at the Facebook offices last year to know that. I think we really connected.