Pinned straw:
I'm not surprised @Slomo and @thunderhead either.
That said timing of announcement and questions it leaves are less than ideal. Who knows how the market reacts on Monday. The question for me though - is this a better business without David?
My answer would be no as while I like Vlad and his bulldog approach, the rest of the Board is pretty soft, meaning he is probably going to be unconstrained and possibly takes too many risky bets now.
In addition if David starts to sell down more to fund his other passions, thats a lot of downward pressure on share prices for quite some time.
While it is always a bummer to see a founder-operator of such vintage leave the company he established and grew, it seemed to be in the works for a while given the growing time he spent on his other interests, and significant share sales in recent years.
Investors can take confidence in an established and long standing second-in-line executive team, who are all well-aligned with investors. He will also stick around for six months as a consultant, so the departure is not going to be as abrupt as it seems.