Yes, but there's two of them.

It's not preferred shares that are letting these founders retain control, it's having multiple classes of common stock where either the public investors get no votes for their shares, or the founders have 10+ for each of their shares, so that their vote always wins. This article gives a good overview of some of the changes that have occurred that have allowed this issue to proliferate (although the main issue seems to be a glut of capital and FOMO for these deals):

https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2017/05/26/snap-and-the-rise...

> Preferred shares existed before Facebook, and it may not the be norm, but there's a reason we no longer see the hostile takeovers from the 80's.

That has nothing to do with preferred shares. Most of public companies adopted poison pills aka shareholder right protection plans which work along the lines of this:

1. If someone acquires a certain percentage of company shares without board of directors agreeing to it, then the company automatically issues a very large number (2x to 3x) of shares and allows shareholders of record of a certain past date before the hostile party launched the acquisition to obtain newly issued shares at a discount.

2. Board members have staggered terms so the acquiring party cannot replace more than a small percentage of board members thereby preventing the one's ability to flood the board one's supporters

It used to be that preferred shares were a special class of equity that paid higher dividends. The funny part is that tech companies tend not to pay any dividends what so ever and now with the special classes of shares that have nearly no voting rights ( compared to the 'preferred shares' that are controlled by the insiders ) the same companies make a virtual mockery out of the concept of a "public company". Facebook is not a public company in any sense other than the name -- it is Mark's personal piggybank that he shares with a few insiders with the crums off the table being given to the people whom he used to call "stupid".