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

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

#41

Post by sp332 »

zizee wrote: post #21
ConstantineXVI wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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.

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.

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

#42

Post by luriel »

wilschroter wrote: post #38

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 pl…

> 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.

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

#43

Post by drone »

tayl0r wrote: post #32
chmars wrote: post #31

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…

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 car…

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.

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

#44

Post by _delirium »

drone wrote: post #43
tayl0r wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 car…

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 te…

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.

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

#45

Post by wmf »

zizee wrote: post #21
ConstantineXVI wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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.

You're forgetting liquidation preference.

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

#46

Post by ericflo »

luriel wrote: post #42
wilschroter wrote: post #38

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 pl…

> 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 awfu…

I believe in psychology this is called the "Fundamental Attribution Error."

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

#47

Post by rokhayakebe »

luriel wrote: post #42
wilschroter wrote: post #38

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 pl…

> 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 awfu…

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.

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

#48

Post by sxp »

wilschroter wrote: post #38

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 pl…

The unanswered question is how much he profited from the move of selling the company. If firing all of the old people, devaluing their stock to $0, and reforming the company netted him a $1M bonus, then he is still a greedy bastard and donating a few thousand dollars to a fund doesn't change that. When something similar happened at my previous company, the people in charge got a large cash award as part of the acquisition while a bunch of employees lost their jobs and had their stock devalued to $0 so it is plausible that the same thing happened here. At another company I was at, the CEO laid off a large portion of the company for budget reasons but also paid us 2 weeks of salary out of his personal account in addition to our normal severance pay.

$50k split between all the people who made this decision is a trivial amount of money compared to their salaries and bonuses.

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

#49

Post by wilschroter »

sxp wrote: post #48
wilschroter wrote: post #38

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 pl…

The unanswered question is how much he profited from the move of selling the company. If firing all of the old people, devaluing their stock to $0, and reforming the company netted him a $1M bonus, then he is still a greedy bastard and donating a few thousand dollars to a fund doesn't change that. When something similar happened at my previous company, the people in charge got a large cash award as part of the acquis…

Let's first agree that none of us knows.

What if he did NOT profit? What if he lost millions of his own personal net worth? Would you consider him the opposite of a bastard?

There are very few instances where a company takes a complete header like this and the CEO gets paid handsomely. And how can you compare being in $40 million of cash debt and putting the company to ABC against selling a company in an acquisition?

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

#50

Post by ghshephard »

keidian wrote: post #10
ghshephard wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

So, you believe they should have just gone bankrupt, liquidated, and left everyone out of a job? I'm trying to parse your response to see what you would have done, and it seems that the part that upsets you is the "shutting down the company and making a brand new one immediately" - I'm wondering whether you would have preferred just shutting everything down? From my reading, it appears they were out of cash.
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