Last week at this time it was popular to pile on Onlive's CEO to say "he fired everyone and stole the company!".
No one asked why he did it. The common thread was "he was greedy!"
That really pisses me off. We come to find out a week later that the company was days away from total insolvency and that structuring an ABC to deal with $40 million of debt was the only way to keep anyone's jobs. It's a brutally painful place to be.
Sometimes people do awful things for simple and awful reasons. But I believe that's rare. I believe some people are forced to do awful things that they would never otherwise do given the option. I think in this case people didn't want to know, or perhaps didn't care to know why it happened. They just wanted to blame someone.
I fear the media's growing lack of interest in the why.
The unanswered question is how much he profited from the move of selling the company. If firing all of the old people, devaluing their stock to $0, and reforming the company netted him a $1M bonus, then he is still a greedy bastard and donating a few thousand dollars to a fund doesn't change that. When something similar happened at my previous company, the people in charge got a large cash award as part of the acquisition while a bunch of employees lost their jobs and had their stock devalued to $0 so it is plausible that the same thing happened here. At another company I was at, the CEO laid off a large portion of the company for budget reasons but also paid us 2 weeks of salary out of his personal account in addition to our normal severance pay.
$50k split between all the people who made this decision is a trivial amount of money compared to their salaries and bonuses.
> Sometimes people do awful things for simple and awful reasons. But I believe that's rare. I believe some people are forced to do awful things that they would never otherwise do given the option. I think in this case people didn't want to know, or perhaps didn't care to know why it happened. They just wanted to blame someone.
This is the essence of many of the problems in our lives.
When somebody does something awful, usually there is a reason other than that they are a 'bad person', there are complex reasons, maybe wrong reasons, but there are reasons why they did what they did, and is important to understand those reasons before criticizing.
Some times an awful thing is the best you can do, because the alternatives are even worse. Those decisions are the most difficult and painful to make, and rarely anyone appreciates it.
that's stand up. At WebTV, at acquisition, he gave the staff a considerable amount of his stock in gratitude to sweeten their take - so I honestly don't think he has made the moves he did out of a desire to screw the staff but to save 50% instead of having to fire 100%.
The link shows is a community fundraiser for COBRA donations to the laid off staff. It shows a bit over $55,000 in donations which came from a list of dozens and dozens of people, 52 right now. Stephen G. Perlman, the CEO is in fact in the list of donors, but it doesn't say how much each person donated. There is no indicator anywhere here that he himself donated almost everything there. Does the OP have another source where he mentions having donated $50k personally?
Seems like an attempt to get over some of the extremely bad press to me. While it's good for the ex-employees, it was still a really crappy thing to do in the first place.
He seems to have done something that we very, very rarely see in corporate america, which is show genuine leadership. I'm wondering, keidian, what you believe you would have done that would have been less "really crappy." Genuinely interested.
Letting the company run dry and not telling anyone until paychecks bounce would have been even worse. It doesn't seem like anyone made a clean getaway from this at all (Perlman himself isn't even taking salary from "OnLive2").
Hopefully this entire episode straightens itself out - I was worried that Perlman was not the man I judged him out to be from a far (talks/papers/history/work). It seriously undermined my confidence in my ability to judge the character of the people around me (I'm still doubtful of course - but this shook me a little bit more than usual).
Looks like a bit of poor cash flow management - mixed with some unfortunate acquisition manoeuvres lead OnLive to this rather nasty juncture (Sony's Gaiki acquisition - inability to monetize - inability to sign up profitably - too much scale too fast).
OnLive is still a great idea - and as John Carmack has stated (paraphrased):
> "Cloud gaming is a technical inevitability. It will happen within the next 5 years."
And someone is still going to make a lot of money. I'm still betting it'll be Perlman and his team.
The only reason to believe he was a bad person, or not the person you thought he was, was a completely made-up and unsubstantiated hit article by Tech Crunch designed as link bait. Before that article, it was just another matter of a poorly performing business plan that needed to be addressed.
How many months of medical coverage through health insurance can you buy in the US for 55'000 USD?
In the case of my own health insurance outside the US, I could pay the premiums for about 11 years.
As a sidenote, living in a country where health insurance is mandatory and not linked to having a job, I am always shocked that Americans loss job and health insurance if they get fired. Isn't the getting fired bad enough, especially in today's economy?
That is one of the problems in the US right now. Unless you or your spouse works at a business that gives good health care benefits, buying it yourself is prohibitively expensive.
The Affordable Healthcare Act (Obamacare) is trying to remedy this by creating the insurance exchanges and making everyone buy insurance. That should all be setup sometime in 2013 I think.
Until then, I'm staying in Germany where health care is actually affordable for self-employed people.
It really really depends. If you're young and healthy you can buy many years of health insurance for $55,000. If you have cancer in remission, on the other hand, you probably can't buy health insurance on the open market for any price. Many other people are somewhere in between those two extremes.
On the plus side, it looks like the employees here are eligible for COBRA, which lets you buy into your previous employee health plan for up to 18 months. That at least gives you a semi-fixed group rate that doesn't depend on preexisting conditions. The regulated health insurance exchanges that should be opening by January 1, 2014 under the new healthcare reform will also (if all goes well) make things much better, albeit still much more complex and bureaucratic than necessary (living in Denmark now and contemplating moving back to the U.S., I'm not looking forward to the huge increase in healthcare complexity).
[+] [-] wilschroter|13 years ago|reply
No one asked why he did it. The common thread was "he was greedy!"
That really pisses me off. We come to find out a week later that the company was days away from total insolvency and that structuring an ABC to deal with $40 million of debt was the only way to keep anyone's jobs. It's a brutally painful place to be.
Sometimes people do awful things for simple and awful reasons. But I believe that's rare. I believe some people are forced to do awful things that they would never otherwise do given the option. I think in this case people didn't want to know, or perhaps didn't care to know why it happened. They just wanted to blame someone.
I fear the media's growing lack of interest in the why.
[+] [-] sxp|13 years ago|reply
$50k split between all the people who made this decision is a trivial amount of money compared to their salaries and bonuses.
[+] [-] luriel|13 years ago|reply
This is the essence of many of the problems in our lives.
When somebody does something awful, usually there is a reason other than that they are a 'bad person', there are complex reasons, maybe wrong reasons, but there are reasons why they did what they did, and is important to understand those reasons before criticizing.
Some times an awful thing is the best you can do, because the alternatives are even worse. Those decisions are the most difficult and painful to make, and rarely anyone appreciates it.
[+] [-] tomasien|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lrobb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vlokshin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lancewiggs|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] outside1234|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] droithomme|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notimetorelax|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keidian|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghshephard|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ConstantineXVI|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmf|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] confluence|13 years ago|reply
Looks like a bit of poor cash flow management - mixed with some unfortunate acquisition manoeuvres lead OnLive to this rather nasty juncture (Sony's Gaiki acquisition - inability to monetize - inability to sign up profitably - too much scale too fast).
OnLive is still a great idea - and as John Carmack has stated (paraphrased):
> "Cloud gaming is a technical inevitability. It will happen within the next 5 years."
And someone is still going to make a lot of money. I'm still betting it'll be Perlman and his team.
[+] [-] drone|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chmars|13 years ago|reply
In the case of my own health insurance outside the US, I could pay the premiums for about 11 years.
As a sidenote, living in a country where health insurance is mandatory and not linked to having a job, I am always shocked that Americans loss job and health insurance if they get fired. Isn't the getting fired bad enough, especially in today's economy?
[+] [-] tayl0r|13 years ago|reply
The Affordable Healthcare Act (Obamacare) is trying to remedy this by creating the insurance exchanges and making everyone buy insurance. That should all be setup sometime in 2013 I think.
Until then, I'm staying in Germany where health care is actually affordable for self-employed people.
[+] [-] _delirium|13 years ago|reply
On the plus side, it looks like the employees here are eligible for COBRA, which lets you buy into your previous employee health plan for up to 18 months. That at least gives you a semi-fixed group rate that doesn't depend on preexisting conditions. The regulated health insurance exchanges that should be opening by January 1, 2014 under the new healthcare reform will also (if all goes well) make things much better, albeit still much more complex and bureaucratic than necessary (living in Denmark now and contemplating moving back to the U.S., I'm not looking forward to the huge increase in healthcare complexity).
[+] [-] ars|13 years ago|reply
Much longer for an individual, and about 5 times longer for family insurance if you are willing to have a deductible.