7 ms·

Onlive CEO fires staff, then donates $50,000 to health insurance fund

• tomasien 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    ^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 14y ago
      A little meta, but whatever... I am not sure the reason, but the "this" thing really annoys me. Am I the only one?
      • hnhg 14y ago
        No. It adds nothing except irritation.
      • sliverstorm 14y ago
        ^ 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.
        • zizee 14y ago
          DAE? Whoops! What is that one? My appeal to the masses? Going off topic? Talking meta?
        • lacerus 14y ago
          DAE = Does Anybody Else. I had to look it up, too. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dae http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dae
      • icebraining 14y ago
        It's just another word for "I agree".
        • davidw 14y ago
          HN and other sites have an 'I agree' button. Should that prove insufficient for expressing your enthusiasm for someone's comment, you can always find a grammatically correct way of saying "I agree", ranging from "I cannot more emphatically state my heartfelt support for your point of view!" to "FUCK YEAH!". "This." has always just seemed like a meme for the terminally grammar deficient.
          • endlessvoid94 14y ago
            Technically the upvote/downvote aren't for agreeing and disagreeing, they're for curating the content to stay on-topic. But in practice everyone uses them as agree/disagree.
          • vlokshin 14y ago
            Wow. What is wrong with "you people". Hacker News has turned into a really bad episode of the Player Hater's Ball. I used the word "THIS". As much as I actually like the term, how exactly does that make one "terminally grammar deficient"? Good to know that we can forget about the middle east for a while and focus on problems with THIS. Just let it go, man. Life will be SO much easier for you if you just let shit that really doesn't matter go. Read it, react. If you REALLY can't control that reaction and THIS just REALLY grinds your gears... go ahead and comment. I don't want your next aneurysm on my conscience. Maybe think about controlling what annoys you a bit. They have really good articles online for this kind of stuff -- lots of people are dealing with it. You are not alone. YOU ARE NOT ALONE.
      • vlokshin 14y ago
        My deepest apologies Zizee. I'll think a lot longer before commenting next time. I'll be sure to keep your annoyances in mind. Thanks so much for your insight. Seriously man. "THIS" (read: your grievances) are beyond first world problems. Pick your battles. Stop making annoy-enemies for stupid reasons. Go do something productive. I thought the guy was insightful, so I said it in my own way. Go do something productive.
  • lrobb 14y ago
    "My philosophy is that if I take care of you, you're going to take care of my business" - one of the best guys I ever worked for.
  • lancewiggs 14y ago
    Akio Morita, cofounder of Sony, said essentially this in his biography. Sony was, of course, the Apple of its time.
• keidian 14y ago
  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.
  • wmf 14y ago
    Would it have been less crappy to shut the company down completely?
    • keidian 14y ago
      Being able to dump in 50k after bad press and saying "I just added $50K to the bucket and will add more as needed" makes me cynical I guess. shrugs
      • wmf 14y ago
        It proves that he didn't put every last cent into the company, but that's a pretty high standard considering he's probably already lost millions.
        • astrodust 14y ago
          When you do that you won't get very far. Not everyone has Elon Musk's golden horseshoe.
        • skilesare 14y ago
          Do you have any idea how many different things Perlman is involved in? If he had put every last cent into on-live our future would be worse off. Google the work he is doing in the wireless networking space(DIDO). Your iPhone 7 is probably going to run it.
    • zizee 14y ago
      Was the company valueless when it was sold? How much did it sell for? Were the proceeds distributed fairly?
  • 14y ago
• outside1234 14y ago
  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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    There's a comment from "President/CEO at OnLive" where he wrote that he donated 50K and will donate more if needed.
    • droithomme 14y ago
      OK, thanks, in my browser the comments on the donation page show up as empty.
• chmars 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      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 14y ago
        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.
• confluence 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.
• wilschroter 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    > 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.
    • ericflo 14y ago
      I believe in psychology this is called the "Fundamental Attribution Error."
    • rokhayakebe 14y ago
      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.