
Onlive CEO fires staff, then donates $50,000 to health insurance fund - gurglz
https://www.wepay.com/donations/ex-onlive-cobra-fund
======
wilschroter
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.

~~~
luriel
> 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.

~~~
rokhayakebe
_Some times an awful thing is the best you can do, because the alternatives
are even worse._

That is a slippery slope and a possible excuse for loosing dignity.

~~~
puddah_of_doubt
"The hard part was getting the brain out. HAHAHA"

-Professor Hubert J Farnsworth.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUZg11EtUP8>

------
tomasien
If you want to stay a leader, this is how you do it. Treat every single person
who sacrifices their time for you like family. That's a leader.

~~~
vlokshin
^THIS. Seriously. Go write a book with this title and make millions. Take care
of the people that help you on the way, of course.

~~~
zizee
A little meta, but whatever... I am not sure the reason, but the "this" thing
really annoys me. Am I the only one?

~~~
sliverstorm
^ THIS.

Of course, it's ironic that in a single breath you complain of the "^ THIS"
trope, while at the same time invoking the "DAE" trope.

~~~
lacerus
DAE = Does Anybody Else. I had to look it up, too.
<http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dae>

------
outside1234
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%.

------
droithomme
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?

~~~
notimetorelax
There's a comment from "President/CEO at OnLive" where he wrote that he
donated 50K and will donate more if needed.

~~~
droithomme
OK, thanks, in my browser the comments on the donation page show up as empty.

------
keidian
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.

~~~
ghshephard
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.

~~~
keidian
Honestly? Doing a mass layoff will suck regardless, but doing it by shutting
down the company and making a brand new one immediately rubs me the wrong way.
While no one likes to be laid off, I think people would have been able to at
least hold their head high about the work they had been doing rather than the
stigma of being remembered as working at OnLive before _AND_ being out of a
job.

Side note: Wonder just how low my karma will sink after this post and my
original one lol. Seems like people don't agree with me, which is fine :)

~~~
ConstantineXVI
The shutting down/new company business is essentially a convoluted form of
bankruptcy[0] that allowed them to keep the lights on; out of context it looks
bad but it could have been much worse.

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_assignment> (note this
technically/legally isn't bankruptcy, but has a rather similar effect)

~~~
zizee
I don't know the full situation, but if each of those who were laid off owned
part of the company it seems a little unfair for the majority shareholder to
be able to sell the company to himself, leaving everyone else with nothing.
What should have happened is that the company should go up for auction and the
proceeds split by percentage owned.

~~~
sp332
They didn't own stock in the company. They had stock options which were
cancelled. Which is just as well maybe since they would have also owned a
piece of the debt.

------
confluence
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.

~~~
drone
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.

------
chmars
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?

~~~
tayl0r
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.

~~~
drone
It is only prohibitively expensive if you have a pre-existing condition. I
have an excellent PPO for which I pay $200 a month, has a $1,000 deductible,
and $20 copays. I'm in my mid-thirties and was a smoker for 18 years. If I had
lied about my smoking, it would've been $150. My fiancee, her policy is $240 a
month for the same. Now, if we had children? Yes, covering the children would
be quite a bit more - as they tend to use more healthcare than we do.

~~~
_delirium
One problem is that, under current law, you tend to only get those rates until
you get sick. Insurance companies aren't allowed to actually jack up your
rates if you get sick, but they tend to do so in tranches: every N years
they'll discontinue one insurance program and institute a new one. Healthy
people can apply for the new one with lower rates, but people with preexisting
conditions will be denied a transfer to the new program. The old program will
then enter a death spiral where only people who have e.g. cancer or diabetes
are stuck there, because once you're seriously ill you can't go anywhere else
(at least as an individual purchaser). Then the rates start being jacked up
each year to account for the now-less-healthy pool. (This pattern is called
the "closed block" problem, and some states have been attempting to add new
regulations to restrict it.)

And of course if you had a childhood condition (beat childhood cancer,
congenital heart defect, etc.) you can never buy in in the first place.

