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A Startup Company's Board Fired Me And Will Pull A Shotgun Clause To Buy My Shares For Pennies On The Dollar Tomorrow. I Also Literally Own The Company's Entire Search Engine Presence And Can (indirectly) Take Its Traffic To 0. Can I Legally Use This For

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Hey all,

Posting on a throwaway for obvious reasons, but this is such a unique case this throwaway probably isn't enough to protect my identity if they really dug into it.

So a couple of years ago, I was onboarded onto a company as an early member and a pretty niche-famous avid growth hacker / hobbyist domainer for... an equity sum in the 2-5% range. The Board of Directors and I haven't had the best relationship, and I was recently fired with a 51% vote.

I have a short notice meeting set up tomorrow around noon where they will discuss "the equity", and I know they fully intend to screw me.

The shotgun clause is pretty brutal. Basically, the company is pulling roughly $500k EBITDA right now, and is still at 'seed' stage investment. The clause states that they can purchase the equity for "any fair market value in good faith" and the floor is literally defined as $1 for a "Bad Leaver" event - which is termination for any cause.

I signed the contract because I believed in the team and product, and knew I had this ace in the hole. Welp.

So, wat they didn't know is that when I was onboarded, I had actually been sitting on a domain in the exact same industry that I'd bought at an auction for well around $20k, and redirected it to the project to jumpstart its SEO / Search Engine presence.

Even today, after considerable marketing, this domain accounts for around 60% of its entire SEO backlink profile. SEO isn't the only channel for revenue by far, but it is a pretty sizable chunk of change at $30-120k / month.

For those of you that know anything about SEO - it means if I yank this plug, and remove the redirect, the traffic will crash to 0 in a matter of weeks. It will take 3 years with the same processes I had in place to recover to the same point before I left. In the meantime, the organic traffic would likely remain at 0 no matter what they tried.

I just wanted to know if:

1) It would be fair game to lay this card on the table for negotiation leverage tomorrow.

2) Is there any grounds for legal retaliation for 'sabotage' or anything of the sort if I were to yank this plug?

3) What's the best way to navigate this?

submitted by /u/Deep-Map7871
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