Mavinkurve is the star of a piece by Matt Richtel on immigration: He won an H-1B visa to work in America for Google, scored big in that company's 2004 IPO, but then fell in love with Samvita Padukone, an India-born woman who couldn't get a permit to work in the U.S. So she got a work permit in Canada, and Mavinkurve relocated to Google's Toronto office. He has to fly a lot, and boy are his arms tired!

That's the sum of the argument the article makes for liberalizing immigration rules. If it sounds weak, that's because it's almost a complete retread of an article which appeared last year in The American, the journal of the American Enterprise Institute, a pro-free-markets think tank.

The argument over liberalizing immigration is kind of stupid. Yes, on the one hand, American companies should hire more American workers. But have you met any American workers lately? Lazy and surly, the lot of them. The number of American college students studying science and engineering has been plummeting for years. Only recently have students started to figure out that studying computer science might be a good idea.

No wonder companies like Google and Microsoft want to hire people like Mavinkurve, who are genuinely excited about living in this country and writing software. So excited that they're willing to put up with any number of insults.

For example: In 2003, as a student at Harvard, the founders of ConnectU had Mavinkurve write code for their then-nascent social network. That group, which included wealthy Olympic-rower twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, then brought on a kid by the name of Mark Zuckerberg to do additional work.

Next thing they knew, he'd launched a remarkably similar site called TheFacebook.com, which ConnectU's founders believed was built on their site's code. Lawsuits ensued, which Facebook settled last year for $65 million.

The Times article described Mavinkurve as having "helped lay the foundation for Facebook" — which can't possibly be true, unless the newspaper is accusing Zuckerberg of having used Mavinkurve's code in his website. Don't feel too bad for Mavinkurve, though: We hear he got a piece of the ConnectU settlement. Now if only he could get his wife a green card.

(Photo via Sanjay Mavinkurve)

The Winklevosses and Narendra, Harvard classmates of Zuckerberg, sued him after he launched Facebook, claiming he had done work for their project and then stolen code from it to start Facebook. They reached a settlement last summer in which Facebook agreed to acquire ConnectU for cash and stock — $20 million in cash and 1.25 million shares of Facebook. But then they fired their former lawyers, Quinn Emanuel, amid a contest over legal fees, the value of the settelement, and new evidence they said they'd discovered.

Based on the price Microsoft paid for its 1.6 percent stake in Facebook in the fall of 2007, the stock component of that settlement was worth $45 million. Quinn Emanuel is seeking $13 million in a contingency fee — 20 percent of the total take, which is $65 million as far as ConnectU's former lawyers are concerned.

But the appraised value of the stock last summer was far less — $11 million, based on a valuation Facebook sought for its own stock-option plan. That's $34 million of $65 million gone.

Even on that lower value for the stock, plus the cash, ConnectU's founders owed taxes. (We hear the deal was structured as a taxable acquisition.) Assuming a capital gains rate of 15 percent and a negligible cost basis for the startup, 15 percent of $31 million. That rounds up to $4.7 million.

Their lawyers want $13 million, leaving them with $2.7 million from the cash component — which they have likely already spent in legal fees.

What about those 1.25 million shares of Facebook? They are essentially worthless. If they could sell them, they would likely get $2.50 to $3 a share. But Facebook recently changed its bylaws to forbid private transfers of its stock without board approval. ConnectU's founders cannot sell them, nor can they give them to their lawyers in lieu of cash, without Facebook's okay. And it is hard to imagine a board of directors essentially controlled by Zuckerberg voting to make life easy for his college rivals. Unless Facebook sells or goes public — both unlikely prospects in the short term — ConnectU's founders have no way of realizing value from their stake. So we can discount their $11 million in notional value from the ConnectU take.

What's left: $2.7 million. Here's a chart showing how you go from $65 million to less than $3 million in four easy steps:

Which explains why the Winklevosses are dragging this thing out. After years of fighting in court, they have essentially nothing to show for their troubles. They come from a wealthy family. Their father, Howard, has a fortune from his company, Winklevoss Technologies, which makes software for analyzing pension plans. So they can afford to fight, and it's not like they need Mark Zuckerberg's money. But how else do the rich keep score?

(Photo by Krupa/AP)

The law firm of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges included the amount of the Facebook settlement in a list of legal victories published in its January newsletter — despite having been fired last year by ConnectU's founders, who sued to have the settlement overturned.

The amount of the settlement, reportedly paid in cash and stock, had never previously been disclosed, and all parties agreed it would be kept confidential. When the Recorder, a San Francisco-based legal publication, noticed the disclosure, the firm's chairman, John Quinn, attempted to persuade a reporter not to publish the figure, citing the confidentiality agreeement.

As a Harvard student in 2003 and 2004, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did some programming work on ConnectU, a college-based social network, shortly before launching his own site, then known as Thefacebook.com, in February 2004. ConnectU's founders included Olympian-rower twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (shirtless, above), as well as Divya Narendra, whom everyone forgets because he's not a hunky, Kennedyesque Olympian rower with a twin brother. They contend that Zuckerberg took work he did for ConnectU and used it in launching what later became Facebook. Tyler Winklevoss called Zuckerberg's actions "premeditated, well thought out, duplicitous and conniving."

The dispute between Narendra and the Winklevosses and their former lawyers is currently in arbitration; the lawyers are seeking payment of $13 million, while ConnectU's founders want the whole agreement overturned, because of new information they discovered about Mark Zuckerberg's sordid college days.

Here's a hypothetical question: Let's assume Facebook had good legal counsel, and ConnectU's founders are right to be angry at their own lawyers. What do they know about Mark Zuckerberg? And how much is information really worth? It's safe to assume that figure is far more than $65 million.

(Photo via Row2k.com)

Played: A twin eunich [sic] with his brother in his high school play, "ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM."

Maybe the Waspy wantrepreneurs can use some of that money from the Facebook settlement to get started as producers in Hollywood. Tip next time they get pitched by a buddy from Harvard to fund his vanity short: It will be about as likely to make any money as it will be for Zuckerberg to publicly admit that he totally ripped you two off.

The pair alleged that Harvard classmate Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea in creating Facebook, ended up settling, and then appealed over the terms of the settlement; a judge denied their request. But if their long-fought legal battle with Facebook proved anything, it's that the JFK Jr.-lite Winklevoss brothers never quit, even when everyone — including judges — thinks they should. Take that, Serbia! (Photo by Getty Images)

The news is hardly bad news for the Winklevoss brothers and ConnectU's third cofounder, Divya Narendra. Court papers say the three will get "millions" of dollars in cash as well as stock in a startup too popular with mainstream America's millennial generation to fail. (The Winklevosses were fighting the settlement after they discovered that the Facebook common stock they would receive was worth less than they supposed.) Plus, there's still that shot at gold.

One would think they would have gotten a proper valuation on the shares before agreeing to take them as payment. That in itself suggests that the twins, who majored in economics at Harvard, weren't paying attention in class.

And if they have some other evidence of brains, it wasn't on display for the Globe. Their coash, Ted Nash, tries to argue that they're just strong, silent types: "Inside, everything's working all the time with them. What you see isn't what you get."

What you see, according to the Globe:

They are impossibly constructed: 6 feet 5 inches tall, with shoulders that jut out like coat hangers, their limbs wrapped in the long, strong muscles typical of rowers, their heads crowned with identical waves of light brown hair.

A photo accompanying the piece shows the two with California governor and former bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger; all three have equally rippling pecs, sculling forward from their white polo shirts.

What you get, from Cameron:

One of the cool things about amateur athletics is that I think the pursuit is sort of the pursuit of excellence for nothing more than trying to be excellent. At the end of the day, going fast in the water, in its own intrinsic value, doesn't mean much more than the time that you put on the clock. But I think it's the focus and the effort and what you put in to become excellent, and the fact that it is, in some respects, meaningless, that makes it all the more interesting. We're getting a lot out of it, but it's not like an NBA championship, or something like that. We're trying to be good at something for the sake of being good.

Sartre would be proud. Tyler's contribution:

"I think people get caught up in what's the value of rowing — what does it do for you? — and that's just totally missing the larger picture.... The way it shook out, we ended up in the pair. We thought it was a good fit for us... If you miss a practice, you pay. It's a direct correlation. You see it. It's impossible to not be hit over the head with that reality.... Everybody counts on every stroke.

At that last bit, Cameron nodded eloquently. And a stereotype held firm.

(Photo by Reuters)

Apparently, in October 2007, Facebook and Microsoft issued a press release stating Microsoft would “take a $240 million stake in Facebook’s next round of financing at a $15 billion valuation.”... Defendants [Facebook] proffer evidence that subsequent to the press release, in the regular course of its operations, Facebook’s Board of Directors determined a value of the company’s “shares” which was different than the valuation disclosed in the press release.

So while Facebook was happy to sell 1.6 percent of the company to Microsoft for $240 million for a $15 billion valuation last fall — and tell the press all about it — remember, that doesn't mean the company is actually worth $15 billion. In fact, a Silicon Alley Insider commenter reports: "Try $2 billion to $3 billion. An owner is out trying to peddle common stock to VC's right now. The price is under $4 billion for sure."(Photo by AP/Ruttle)

Since the Facebook-ConnectU settlement was likely part-cash, part-stock, one possibility is that the ConnectU founders feel misled by the value of the equity portion of the settlement and believe that fraudulent representations about its value were made to them.

Could be. Or it could be that the Winklevoss' and Narendra don't have much going and need more than they originally agreed to. ConnectU has about 2,000 users and the founders' last law firm, Quinn Emanuel, recently filed a lien against Connect for any bounty turned up in court going forward. (Photo by AP/Krupa)