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

Last week at this time it was popular to pile on Onlive's CEO to say "he fired everyone and stole the company!".<p>No one asked <i>why</i> he did it. The common thread was "he was greedy!"<p>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.<p>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 <i>why</i> it happened. They just wanted to blame someone.<p>I fear the media's growing lack of interest in the why.

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.

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%.

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?

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.

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).<p>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).<p>OnLive is still a great idea - and as John Carmack has stated (paraphrased):<p>&#62; <i>"Cloud gaming is a technical inevitability. It will happen within the next 5 years."</i><p>And someone is still going to make a lot of money. I'm still betting it'll be Perlman and his team.

How many months of medical coverage through health insurance can you buy in the US for 55'000 USD?<p>In the case of my own health insurance outside the US, I could pay the premiums for about 11 years.<p>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?