Valley veteran Jim Clark resigns, saying regulations have "gone too far"
Jim Clark, the founder of Web browser Netscape, has resigned as chairman of Redwood City photo printing company Shutterfly, citing securities regulations that have “gone too far.”
Clark held about 30 percent of the company’s shares when it went public in September, but Shutterfly’s technology has matured, and he’d been constrained by Sarbanes-Oxley securities law, he said, citing the reasons why he resigned:
“Sarbox (Sarbanes-Oxley) dictates that I not chair any committee due to the size of my holdings, not be on the compensation committee because of the loan I once made to the company, not be on the governance committee,” Clark wrote in a letter to Shutterfly executives.
“It even dictates that some other board member must carry out the perfunctory duties of the chairman,” he wrote in a letter dated Jan. 1. “What’s left is liability and constraints on stock transactions, neither of which excite me.”
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Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
