From the article:

> Khosla bought the 53-acre property for $32.5 million in 2008 and kept the beach open to the public for two years despite the fact that he was paying $500,000 to $600,000 a year in maintenance costs and liability insurance.

> In 2010, after receiving county court orders -- which he believed were unfair -- to keep the beach access open 24/7 and charge visitors $2 for parking, Khosla ordered his property manager to close the gate permanently.

Seems like it's not so clear cut. I mean, he was eating 500-600k a year without complaint maintaining the property for the public. That's pretty generous. Seems it was a dispute over parking and fees...and considering how trivial $2 is compared to the 500k+ he was already paying it just feels like there's a bit more to this story than "Koshla is an evil 1%'r".

edit

So, it was exceptionally hard finding anything from Khosla himself on the issue. But I did find a few more details on why the beach was closed.

So, when he got the property he allowed the same access as the previous owners. Which was generally accessible during the day, but typically closed at night, during bad whether (often during winter), and when "inconvenient" which I assume is when property managers were on vacation or whatever. This level of access has been confirmed by the previous owners, the Deeney's, in their court testimony.

So, for some unknown reason, the county issued an order to the property manager for them to a) reduce parking fees to $2 (which is what they were in the 1970's) and b) to keep the gate open 24/7.

Khosla's managers/attorney's/whatever thought this was a significant historical change in access policy and so fought it, closing the property until the dispute was resolved.

I got all this from the following article: http://www.mercurynews.com/san-mateo-county-times/ci_2616631...

Well, I guess putting armed guards to block access [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinod_Khosla#Martin.27s_Beach_d...] paying to layers and financing black PR campaigns is expensive. No surprise it could be $500-600k. Or did he actually spend it on cleaning the beach? edit: Or had this $500-600k number been pulled out of thin air, just like 70% number?

According to the article, he spent the 500-600k in the years prior to the dispute when it was open for maintenance and liability insurance.

The dispute was over a court order to also provide parking at a required rate of $2. (just repeating the article that was linked, I'm no expert on the legal details of this case)

Vinod had bought services of a "public-relation management company" to address the issue of this negative PR that he had in regards with the Martin's Beach. That's where 500k number might have came from. Taken out of the air, just like 70% number?

And I wouldn't be surprised that this PR company would try to make a "hero" out of Vinod. And present him as a "hero, who is spending his own private money to support local surfers".

If you want to check facts, don't read blogs/potentially paid articles. Just go to the facts that a non-profit public foundation, created to protect our beaches provides. This foundation is generally spends its efforts on organizing beach cleanups. These are unambiguously good guys. In that case they've had to spend efforts on a lawsuit :(. Anyway, as a public non-profit they just don't have the ability to misrepresent facts or tell fat lies (unlike privately hired PR companies, layers or bloggers). So I'd just trust the facts as they put them:

http://www.surfrider.org/campaigns/entry/open-martins-beach#...

http://martinsbeach.blogspot.com/p/get-involved.html

http://martinsbeach.blogspot.com/

Yes but any of that 500-600k cost which was actually required of him could have easily been known by him at time of purchasing the property. Saying you don't want to pay the required upkeep on something because it only benefits others and not you personally after you get it is pretty assholish.

I updated my original post, but the case was never about that expense or about the level of access historically provided. It was about a court order that required a change to the level of access and support in comparison to what had been provided by him and all previous owners.

In that it told him he could ONLY charge $2 for parking vs the presumably free (EDIT: incorrect assumption on my part, as previous owners also charged a fee, but I can't find any indication that he was being limited to a lower fee than they charged) parking on the road people had been getting with previous owners....

Effectively the court was allowing him to recoup some of his cost with parking, just not at the rate he wanted.

Edit: Oh your original post referred to one up several more levels, when I wrote this response I thought it referred to the post I replied to, but noticed no significant modifications.

Yeah, it also required 24/7 access 365 days a year. Which was above and beyond what everyone else had provided in the past.

It also noted that, at the time, the area's use had declined significantly due to smelt fishing decline which is why the previous owner sold it.

So, when the dispute occurred, he'd been providing the same access as ever when a mandate came out of the blue saying he had to provide a significantly higher level of access than was historically required and whatever extra costs that might incur on a beach that was largely unused at the time overall and during the periods of closer in particular.

So he was like "wtf, why?" in a very legal sense (the only sense that would work in legal disputes). And _only_ after the case went viral as some kind of down with the 1%'rs! rally cry did people actually start bothering to go visit the site...to make a point.

I'm sure the novelty will wear off and then they'll be some property manager that has to sit up there through the night and winter for....nobody.

The 24/7 access 365 days a year wasn't mentioned in the article you linked that you said you got 'all this' from. So would you please provide that source. I see them saying it needed to be open during the winter, and in previous reports I read in one of the other links in this thread that he had tried to close it all winter but has more recently had it open some days during the winter.

Also I fail to see how the decline of the areas use would have anything to do with its availability, this isn't a use it or lose it situation. Can you explain how reduced usage of the beach should effect its availability at all?

There are a lot of unsupported statements going on for both sides if I take the ones that they seem to agree on I get something of a narrative like this.

He bought the property.

He kept the beach open similar to the previous owners.

Tried to charge $X amount for parking.

People complained, and the court told him he could only charge $2.

He said well fuck you guys I'll just close the beach.

He won a case to close the beach.

He lost a 2nd case forcing him to open the beach.

He lost a 3rd beach forcing him to open the beach.

He started opening the beach sometimes. Is it more or less than the previous owners? Well this seems to be where the core disagreement is with no real support or evidence provided to the public for either side.

I think he comes off sounding like a dick, especially at the end of that article that quotes him repeatedly which you linked, where he tries to re-frame the issue as one of conservation. You apparently see him as an entitled land owner, we clearly disagree. However if you would like to continue this, which there is no need to as I believe we have reached an impasse I would ask that any numbers you use are ones I can verify. Thank you.

and sometimes you learn about a person by working with them. Long ago, Vinod was an investor and director of two of my early companies. He was helpful, supportive, polite and wonderful.

To be fair, being helpful to a company you have an investment in is just a good business move... it doesn't implicitly make you a "better person".

I don't know Vinod Khosla personally but all people have many faces.

Doesn't the placard at Jimmy Jon's say something like "You can't tell how nice a person is by how they treat you, watch how they treat the waiter."?

I don't find myself quoting Harry Potter often, but there's a really good quote in Goblet of Fire:

"If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals."

Funny placard, that: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/10/jimmy-johns-noncomp...

How long ago? He's been at this almost 30 years. He doesn't need the money. Now it's all about him. Martin's Beach is the symptom of the disease.

Is the disease greed?

Non-billionaires take actions regularly based on the notion that they are right in their course, morally and or legally.

Now size that up to billionaire status. They too are likely to take actions based on thinking that they are in fact right in their decision making. The issue in that case: billionaires often tend to impact a lot of other people with their actions, because so much of what they do is outsized.

My issue might be with my neighbors on a single property line marker. Or maybe they think my trashcans are encroaching on their curb area, pick the issue.

Billionaires generate billionaire-size problems.

People change

yet again: not agree = downvote.

Low quality comments are consistently downvoted without remorse. Your response added nothing substantive or interesting for people to read on the comment page. You didn't even bother to use proper syntax. By contrast, you will note that your original comment, disagreeable as it may be to the other commentator and to the other friends of Mr. Khosa, has not been downvoted.

Maybe, but more downvotes were for the initial comment

You need to think about it this way: historically, the comment pages of HN have made for very good, diverse, and interesting reading. One learns odd and varied details about historical technological decisions, rocket engine design, et cetera... anything may come up. The commentators on Hacker News include a wide variety of domain experts, mildly historical figures, legions upon legions of extremely experienced programmers, managers, entrepreneurs, and so on. This is what has drawn most of us here. The comments, ideas, and speculations produced by persons such as myself are fine, perhaps, but frankly, they're not nearly as interesting to read.

This leads us to one of the most frustrating oddities of the Hacker News website: you can't collapse the comments. If there's a tree structure of comments, every comment will take up at least a good thumb's width of screen space.

The consequence of this is that every comment is an imposition on the reader. Every comment needs to be able to account for itself. Posting on Hacker News is a performance, rather than a conversation. We're on stage, whether anyone wants us there or not, and unless we're trying to write words that other people might find valuable, unless we're at least trying, then yes, we will be swiftly downvoted to oblivion by everyone, including people exactly like ourselves. There may be annoyance behind it, but there's scarcely enough thought wasted for malice.

One-liners must be very informative or situationally relevant messages. And properly capitalized and punctuated. Or else they should go unwritten.

And I upvoted yours for the same reasons :)

The article also indicates he was paying a very large amount in liability taxes and maintaince for a road he possibly owned (it says $500k), and was only offered the ability to charge $2 for parking to offset that. Given, I'm not sure where the $500k comes from.

It also seems he was trying to restrict access to the road, not the beach.

Maybe he didn't own the road, but it seems you should be able to restrict access to a road you own, but that no one owns a beach, and it didn't actually say he restricted the beach.

Maybe that was the intent, but maybe it was due to problems with the cars parking along the road after leaving it open for two years.

I do believe most VCs can reduce the potential of the company when the founders have a cohesive vision for it already and know how to run it, and they do have an interest in saying they are better than the others :) So it is a lot about finding those that give good advice, but don't force it, and that's incredibly hard to judge in initial conversations with any of them.

I'd recommend talking to companies they are invested in and their fellow board members (i.e. the founders who created the tech) that work for companies they have invested in.

It's very common for property owners to be required to allow access to another property.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easement

Basically, he entered into a contract as part of buying property and now he does not want to abide by it. Which suggests doing business with him is a terrible idea.

I have some relevant experience. My father owns a property with an easement, purchased from an attorney who worked in easement law, in a different jurisdiction: this man himself mistook some points of law, and last minute paperwork was required. At several levels of government, various departments use maps that clearly indicate (incorrectly) that my father does not own the easement, and the city at one time attempted to suggest that it was frontage. And this is regarding an easement whereupon there is a well-established thicket, not a road.

This brings me to the consideration that real estate agents are not lawyers, and that legal status of the easement might have been unclear or incorrectly represented when the purchase was made. Also, I think that if the road was being treated simultaneously as a liability and an obligation by whatever mix of regional law pertained, a legal confrontation would be completely understandable.

I do not know or assert that any of these things are the case, but I know that easements are complicated beasts, and that a simple violation of contract may not be the only explanation here.

If he didn't want that responsibility, then he shouldn't have bought the land in the first place.

What I gather from that is that this guy does not know how to monetize a road and/or run a public beach.

Build something along side the road. Build a strip mall and rent bays to surf shops and restaurants. For the amount of money the article claimed he spent he could have afforded to build a hotel or resort.

> Build a strip mall and rent bays to surf shops and restaurants

The government would not allow this to happen. The California Coastal Commission prohibits any such development. I've talked to a local architect who had his plans to remodel an existing single-family home in that area scuttled by the commission. That's why, when driving south after Half Moon Bay, you encounter essentially no coastal development until you hit Santa Cruz.

There are one or two shops scattered along the way but those are grandfathered in; as far as I can tell if it didn't exist 30-40 years ago, it never will. If Vinod Khosla proposed building a strip mall, anti-development activists from all of California would converge on Martin's Beach and chain themselves to the bulldozers while conducting a hunger strike while environmental groups would file at least three parallel lawsuits.

Put another way, SF bay area politics are non-intuitive.

(Note I'm not expressing a normative opinion about whether development should be allowed; I'm merely saying what is currently allowed.)

It sounded like the road was longish. I meant he should put things on that road. Whatever it was could still be off the beach but monetizable.

Land is usually easy monetize, even after licenses and regulations, why does this billionaire have such trouble?

The guy is a billionaire, he doesn't care about whatever measly profit he'd make from putting a strip mall there...

Build a strip mall? I think the value of the beach is that it lacks strip malls.

"Build a strip mall"

This is quite possibly the worst idea there is.