Should Mahalo's investors be concerned that the Mahalo CEO, former Mahalo CTO, and now-former Mahalo Community Director are all working for ThisWeekIn? Wouldn't there be a contractual clause preventing Calacanis from hiring away Mahalo staff for his new business?
In both cases our CTO and Community Director were looking to do something new after almost four years and there were people coming up behind them. They got multiple job offers from amazing companies and decided to work at one of my companies... which actually share space with Mahalo.
So, we get to keep them "in the building" and all that knowledge stays here and Mahalo gets it for free!
This is my model: hire great people, invest in them and if I can't keep them past 3-4 years at one company get them a slot at one of my other companies! :-)
Well the whole idea behind mahalo is stupid and it only gets traffic because Jason send traffic there. But no one is thinking "I'm going to search for something, gee I'll try mahalo". Jason's link baiting is the main traffic source and mahalo will prolly be out of business at some point in the next 3 years. So maybe they fold thisweekin into mahalo and maybe get the investors something.
I had 1.4M lined up for another company; I decided to ditch that and come back 'in the building' to work with Jason on ThisWeekIn. So: yeah, this is a good thing, and actually good for Mahalo, counter-intuitive as that may sound on the surface. Makes room for other great people in Mahalo to move up, who may otherwise have moved on.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/24/how-not-to-handle-a-resigna... (the pastebin link has expired)
and shows that at least they have a sense of humour at Mahalo.
They also have a page on Mahalo dedicated to the incident:
http://www.mahalo.com/answers/from-email/what-is-the-worst-w...