

Calacanis: "Tough times, hard decisions at Mahalo" - daveambrose
http://calacanis.com/2008/10/22/tough-times-hard-decisions/

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nradov
What's the point of Mahalo anyway? Does anyone actually use it? I took a quick
look and it seems like a weird mix of Dogpile, About.com, and Wikipedia
without any unique value added. The searches I tried for a few consumer
products and technical terms turned up mostly irrelevant results.

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apgwoz
His blog article (I thought he retired from blogging...) mentions it gets 4M
uniques a month, so people are obviously using it.

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shafqat
I've never seen a result in Google that led me to Mahalo. Who are these 4M???

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ojbyrne
A year ago it was quite common to see Mahalo show up in google searches.
They're in decline.

Hate to bring up digg, but its in a positive light rather than my usual
bitching. When we were around 4 million uniques we had 4 people (not actually
employees, this was pre-series A), and Calacanis tried to buy us for $5 mill
(almost all of it subject to earnouts). Rough subjective cash estimate of
mahalo valuation based on his own offer to digg - half a mill.

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fallentimes
This was just an excuse to lay off people.

If Calacanis was 1/4 of awesome as he thought he was, or the people he hired
were 1/2 as good as he says they are, or he had 1/3 as much money as he says
he does, he would have done everything in his power to keep these people
including reducing his own salary to $0.

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staunch
Agreed. I think it's hilarious watching so many companies use the current
situation as an excuse to fire people. I have no problem with CEOs firing
people for whatever reason but it is pretty pathetic when they use such
transparent and bullshit excuses.

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jshen
If you care about people at all it's much better to "lay them off" than to
"fire them".

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jumper
If they're never told their performance is inadequate, how will they ever know
to improve? This reminds of the old political correctness slide into
oblivion...

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jshen
You're assumption is usually false in my experience. Most of the people I laid
off were told of their shortcomings long before being laid off. It's expensive
to find and hire good people and it's also human nature, at least mine, to try
to help people improve before giving up on them. Also, when profits are high
it's easy to let things slide. When those profits evaporate and tough choices
have to be made you lay off rather than fire those that never met the
expectations.

Where is the slide into oblivion exactly? I think the slide begins when we
loose our humanity and run around firing people willy nilly.

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sant0sk1
I thought Calacanis renounced blogging and began an opt-in mailing list..?!

The things some people will do to get attention...

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nolanbrown23
He's a great business mind but a seemingly terrible leader. If I hire someone
I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure they keep their job
(provided they are doing their job and doing it well).

All he's doing at this point is contributing to and prolonging the recession
by firing people. In the long run, firing 10% of the workforce isn't going to
be the life or death of the company.

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arockwell
I don't understand your reasoning at all. He specifically states that reducing
the workforce will give Mahalo an extra year of runway. That could definitely
be the difference between life and death.

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charlesju
I'm surprised that Jason made over $10 M in revenue from just advertising,
that's really impressive.

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ojbyrne
6 offices?

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henning
So he fired people based purely on hunch and speculation rather than reacting
to concrete information he actually had.

That's a recipe for success!

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comatose_kid
You are right - he wasn't being reactive, he was being proactive, trying to
steer his ship ahead of the oncoming storm.

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henning
If you make decisions based on what will _probably_ happen, the proactive
thing is to shut down the operation entirely, because most companies fail. But
you don't know whether that's going to happen.

Firing people is not free. All the time and energy spent investing in them is
essentially gone. You shouldn't do it unless you have a solid reason to.

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apgwoz
The impression I got from reading his article is that with the lay-off, Mahalo
can survive with no external funding (or revenue) until 2012.

