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1. We're working with the folks impacted to place them at whatever company they would like to join. I'm personally reaching out to folks who might want these fi

1. We're working with the folks impacted to place them at whatever company they would like to join. I'm personally reaching out to folks who might want these fine people. They will all wind up on their feet and be great additions to the vibrant startup scene in Los Angeles. 2. Mahalo is doing amazing videos with experts, but our (text) articles were created by passionate writers who are not necessarily experts. Google want's experts, so we're doubling down and getting experts to help build curriculums and lesson plans for our videos. I'm 100% certain that will solve the problem. 3. You can think of us as a free version of Lynda.com for everything. Or a version of Kahn Academy for everything. Imagine tens of thousands of these type of pages and videos being made a year: http://www.mahalo.com/learn-adobe-photoshop-adjustments-panel/ http://www.mahalo.com/learn-adobe-photoshop-adjustments-pane... We're going to teach folks every major piece of software, every recipe of note, how to change their oil and how to play any song on guitar or piano. http://www.youtube.com/howtoplayguitar2 http://www.youtube.com/howtoplayguitar2 Video is the future, and we're going to be the largest creator of educational videos this year. It sucks that we got hit so hard, but we will come back stronger. The 95 members of the team that are still with us are more committed than ever to the mission. Yes, it really sucked to get off stage after 47 amazing LAUNCH companies had such amazing launches on stage. I got told on my way to the after party. We struggled over these decisions all weekend with the leadership team. At the end of the day entrepreneurship is about kicking ass and getting your ass kicked. I've been through this many times, but I would be lying if I said it didn't impact me. It does. This is the first time I had such a big high followed by such a low, low. OK, time to change a diaper and give a bottle. No rest for the weary. Back to work.

mypityforyou 16y ago
How many weeks severance did you give them? Did you pay it in actual dollars, or Mahalo dollars, with the patented Mahalo exchange rate?
staunch 16y ago
You like brutal honesty and you put yourself out there, so I think it's fair to ask you. Why don't you leave your role at Mahalo and do what you're the absolute best at? (TWiST, LAUNCH Conf, TC competitor)? Plenty of people can do a video eHow, but almost no one else could rival TC. It seems like a pride/ego/money thing from the outside. Is it something else?
- tertius 16y ago
  It's his company. I guess he wants to keep it going himself.
- jasonmcalacanis 16y ago
  Well, I really believe in the mission to build a site that helps people learn anything... and I believed in human-powered search before that (and still do to be honest). I've got the education bug, and I want to take the promise we all see in things like Lynda.com and Kahn Academy and scale it into a brand as big as Google or Wikipedia. LAUNCH, Angel investing and This Week in Startups are all fun, but they are not as challenging as MAHALO. Also, keep in mind that Mahalo is a top 200/300 site with millions in revenue even with this hit. It's the most successful thing I've done.... despite the hits we've taken.
  - ComputerGuru 16y ago
    For someone so obsessed with education sites...... s/Kahn/Khan from both your posts.
    - georgemcbay 16y ago
      I wasn't going to say anything... but I find the straight-up 4th grade grammatical issues (eg. "Google want's") to be far more annoying than the proper name misspellings.
  - marcamillion 16y ago
    Jason...some constructive feedback: Perhaps you shouldn't try to be 'everything to everybody'. I might not be your demographic, but whenever I think of learning I never think of Mahalo. I would say choose one vertical that you can conquer - from an education play - and conquer it. Then branch out horizontally. You can't beat Lynda.com, Khan Academy and every other learning site at the same time. Take it one vertical at a time and come up with a unique value proposition. Lynda.com was the first mainstream internet video portal to make programming/technical tutorial videos and charge for them. People don't go to Khan for the quality of the videos (i.e. fancy production and cameras), it is because he has an interesting way of explaining complex topics - and he focuses on the content (not himself). Those are not very easy to beat, because they have already achieved Product/Market fit. Unfortunately, you guys are still struggling to find yours.
mypityforyou 16y ago
Free advice for entitled Silicon Valley luckboxes: if your shitty content farm gets kicked out of google again and again, you look like a flake.
sofakeekafos 16y ago
>more committed than ever to the mission. Oh my God, I think I just threw up a little in my mouth. What mission would that be? Spamming the web with contrived content related to high-value keywords, for the money?
- aaronwall 16y ago
  Hehehe ... with a close second perhaps being "using deceptive public relations non-sense to get ink any way possible" Good things happen to good people. The opposite is also true. Congrats Jason! :D
  - moultano 16y ago
    Jesus guys, take it elsewhere.
    - sofakeekafos 16y ago
      He's being lionized on HN for making money, while he's polluting the written heritage of the human race. Not a chance I will take it elsewhere. He needs to be called out, to his face, as does anybody who thinks he deserves HN's respect.
      - moultano 16y ago
        Mostly I see people expressing sympathy for a guy who had a really bad day (and a newsworthy one.) And if you think mahalo is polluting the written history of the human race, then boy do I ever have some spam to show you. Mahalo may not be the best, but it certainly isn't the worst.
        ericd 16y ago
        Borderline stuff may actually be worse than blatant crap, because the borderline stuff is harder to classify as crap.
rimantas 16y ago
> Video is the future, and we're going to be the largest > creator of educational videos this year. Oh no. I cannot wait for the video be the past. It may be the best way to teach some things (mainly involving physical activities or physical manipulation of some sort), but for programming topics it most often just waste of time and bandwidth. Why would I want to spend a minute watching someone to type a line of code with all mistypes and corrections, when I can glance it in a second? Why would I want to fiddle with video controls to get replay of particular section when I can reread it much faster whenever I want? Seriously, I am starting to see this tendency to do anything in video as some sort of DRM scheme for content sites. I recently unsubscribed from thinkvitamin.com because they started to push everything to video (with annoying intro at the start of each video). I did check your guitar lessons… Sorry guys, but with "amazing videos" you have you will never ever beat this guy: http://justinguitar.com/ http://justinguitar.com/ (check out his beginners course or intermediate method; http://www.youtube.com/user/JustinSandercoe http://www.youtube.com/user/JustinSandercoe ) — take a look if just to see how expert teaching looks like. I will chose the best over the largest every time.
- danssig 16y ago
  I disagree. For me, I would like to see a world where you could press a button and get a transcript of any video for the times when I don't have the time to dedicate but I would also like the video for those times that I do. The problem with just reading programming things is you're seeing the final product. If you watch the video there is a better chance that you'll see how the person got to that point. The thing that always annoyed me about Haskell tutorials, for example, was people would put in all this beautiful code but I couldn't ever make it run. In a video they would probably ran it themselves and I would have been able to see the import statements they were using but not putting in the tutorial (this isn't a problem with Haskell literate programming afaik).
- JonnieCache 16y ago
  >Why would I want to spend a minute watching someone to type a line of code with all mistypes and corrections, when I can glance it in a second? A lot of people do want this. A good screencast shows not only the code, but the thought process that goes into writing the code. People have different cognitive styles and learn in very different ways. I thought this was common knowledge by now.
andrewvc 16y ago
Jason, we're currently looking to add a third engineer here at VOKLE in Santa Monica, the work's mostly Ruby / Rails, and we've been looking for someone experienced in that area, but given the quality of the Mahalo engineers I have met, I'm sure they'd have no problem getting up to speed. I can be emailed at andrew@vokle.com for details.
oneplusone 16y ago
I took a look at that page you linked as an example of quality content, and I just don't see it. The video was incredible superficial and a better medium would have been screenshots that identified all the UI controls and their function since that is all the video did. Khan Academy has quality content which are dense with information. Your video wasted four minutes and told me nothing I couldn't find out by playing around with Photoshop.

mypityforyou 16y ago

How many weeks severance did you give them? Did you pay it in actual dollars, or Mahalo dollars, with the patented Mahalo exchange rate?

staunch 16y ago

You like brutal honesty and you put yourself out there, so I think it's fair to ask you. Why don't you leave your role at Mahalo and do what you're the absolute best at? (TWiST, LAUNCH Conf, TC competitor)? Plenty of people can do a video eHow, but almost no one else could rival TC. It seems like a pride/ego/money thing from the outside. Is it something else?

tertius 16y ago
It's his company. I guess he wants to keep it going himself.
jasonmcalacanis 16y ago
Well, I really believe in the mission to build a site that helps people learn anything... and I believed in human-powered search before that (and still do to be honest). I've got the education bug, and I want to take the promise we all see in things like Lynda.com and Kahn Academy and scale it into a brand as big as Google or Wikipedia. LAUNCH, Angel investing and This Week in Startups are all fun, but they are not as challenging as MAHALO. Also, keep in mind that Mahalo is a top 200/300 site with millions in revenue even with this hit. It's the most successful thing I've done.... despite the hits we've taken.
- ComputerGuru 16y ago
  For someone so obsessed with education sites...... s/Kahn/Khan from both your posts.
  - georgemcbay 16y ago
    I wasn't going to say anything... but I find the straight-up 4th grade grammatical issues (eg. "Google want's") to be far more annoying than the proper name misspellings.
- marcamillion 16y ago
  Jason...some constructive feedback: Perhaps you shouldn't try to be 'everything to everybody'. I might not be your demographic, but whenever I think of learning I never think of Mahalo. I would say choose one vertical that you can conquer - from an education play - and conquer it. Then branch out horizontally. You can't beat Lynda.com, Khan Academy and every other learning site at the same time. Take it one vertical at a time and come up with a unique value proposition. Lynda.com was the first mainstream internet video portal to make programming/technical tutorial videos and charge for them. People don't go to Khan for the quality of the videos (i.e. fancy production and cameras), it is because he has an interesting way of explaining complex topics - and he focuses on the content (not himself). Those are not very easy to beat, because they have already achieved Product/Market fit. Unfortunately, you guys are still struggling to find yours.

mypityforyou 16y ago

Free advice for entitled Silicon Valley luckboxes: if your shitty content farm gets kicked out of google again and again, you look like a flake.

sofakeekafos 16y ago

>more committed than ever to the mission. Oh my God, I think I just threw up a little in my mouth. What mission would that be? Spamming the web with contrived content related to high-value keywords, for the money?

aaronwall 16y ago
Hehehe ... with a close second perhaps being "using deceptive public relations non-sense to get ink any way possible" Good things happen to good people. The opposite is also true. Congrats Jason! :D
- moultano 16y ago
  Jesus guys, take it elsewhere.
  - sofakeekafos 16y ago
    He's being lionized on HN for making money, while he's polluting the written heritage of the human race. Not a chance I will take it elsewhere. He needs to be called out, to his face, as does anybody who thinks he deserves HN's respect.
    - moultano 16y ago
      Mostly I see people expressing sympathy for a guy who had a really bad day (and a newsworthy one.) And if you think mahalo is polluting the written history of the human race, then boy do I ever have some spam to show you. Mahalo may not be the best, but it certainly isn't the worst.
      - ericd 16y ago
        Borderline stuff may actually be worse than blatant crap, because the borderline stuff is harder to classify as crap.

rimantas 16y ago

> Video is the future, and we're going to be the largest > creator of educational videos this year. Oh no. I cannot wait for the video be the past. It may be the best way to teach some things (mainly involving physical activities or physical manipulation of some sort), but for programming topics it most often just waste of time and bandwidth. Why would I want to spend a minute watching someone to type a line of code with all mistypes and corrections, when I can glance it in a second? Why would I want to fiddle with video controls to get replay of particular section when I can reread it much faster whenever I want? Seriously, I am starting to see this tendency to do anything in video as some sort of DRM scheme for content sites. I recently unsubscribed from thinkvitamin.com because they started to push everything to video (with annoying intro at the start of each video). I did check your guitar lessons… Sorry guys, but with "amazing videos" you have you will never ever beat this guy: http://justinguitar.com/ http://justinguitar.com/ (check out his beginners course or intermediate method; http://www.youtube.com/user/JustinSandercoe http://www.youtube.com/user/JustinSandercoe ) — take a look if just to see how expert teaching looks like. I will chose the best over the largest every time.

danssig 16y ago
I disagree. For me, I would like to see a world where you could press a button and get a transcript of any video for the times when I don't have the time to dedicate but I would also like the video for those times that I do. The problem with just reading programming things is you're seeing the final product. If you watch the video there is a better chance that you'll see how the person got to that point. The thing that always annoyed me about Haskell tutorials, for example, was people would put in all this beautiful code but I couldn't ever make it run. In a video they would probably ran it themselves and I would have been able to see the import statements they were using but not putting in the tutorial (this isn't a problem with Haskell literate programming afaik).
JonnieCache 16y ago
>Why would I want to spend a minute watching someone to type a line of code with all mistypes and corrections, when I can glance it in a second? A lot of people do want this. A good screencast shows not only the code, but the thought process that goes into writing the code. People have different cognitive styles and learn in very different ways. I thought this was common knowledge by now.

andrewvc 16y ago

Jason, we're currently looking to add a third engineer here at VOKLE in Santa Monica, the work's mostly Ruby / Rails, and we've been looking for someone experienced in that area, but given the quality of the Mahalo engineers I have met, I'm sure they'd have no problem getting up to speed. I can be emailed at andrew@vokle.com for details.

oneplusone 16y ago

I took a look at that page you linked as an example of quality content, and I just don't see it. The video was incredible superficial and a better medium would have been screenshots that identified all the UI controls and their function since that is all the video did. Khan Academy has quality content which are dense with information. Your video wasted four minutes and told me nothing I couldn't find out by playing around with Photoshop.