OnLive CEO says 'essential people' being brought back

OnLive CEO Ron Perlman talks about why the company reached such dire straits, and how it plans to bring back some employees in waves going forward.

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In the wake of OnLive's assets sale, the newly formed company has detailed its corporate plans moving forward, and we've learned more about how the news was delivered from company CEO Steve Perlman.

"I've been a non-stop fundraising machine," CEO Steve Perlman told his staff in the announcement, according to Joystiq. "And I finally got to the point where I just could not bring in enough funding to carry this thing forward."

The company claims that almost half of the former employees were given new offers upon the transfer, and that those who weren't hired will be given offers to consult with the new company. The company had filed an "Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors," which has an assignee takes over the assets of the company so that the debts and creditors can get paid off. So far, the assignee is a mysterious venture capitalist. Perlman says he believes in the future of the company, but doesn't have the funds to bring back all 150-200 employees.

Perlman told his employees they would bring back the "essential people" on an as-needed basis, but said that most people wouldn't be coming back on-board. This stripping down to the essentials was to make up for overcompensation of scale in the first place. Perlman says they bought thousands of servers, unsure of how many they would need, and those include contracts to keep them for a length of time. "If you've got 8,000 servers and 1,600 users, how could we ever get to cash flow positive, right?" he asked.

He also said the company expanded its number of employees in the last few years, through the recession, but it contributed to the need to cut. Those who don't get invited back for full contracts will be given a consulting option.

"I'm the one that brought you here. I'm the one that ultimately made decisions," Perlman said. "And I'm the one that ultimately takes responsibility. So I am sorry, and it didn't end up exactly as we'd hoped."

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  • reply
    August 20, 2012 7:45 AM

    Steve Watts posted a new article, OnLive CEO says 'essential people' being brought back.

    OnLive CEO Ron Perlman talks about why the company reached such dire straits, and how it plans to bring back some employees in waves going forward.

    • reply
      August 20, 2012 7:49 AM

      OnLine, OnLive never changes.

    • reply
      August 20, 2012 8:08 AM

      messy!

    • reply
      August 20, 2012 8:11 AM

      *Ron* Perlman...?

    • reply
      August 20, 2012 8:20 AM

      [deleted]

      • reply
        August 20, 2012 9:29 AM

        Chatty news blurbs...Chatty news blurbs never change. because they can't change them once they are posted..

    • reply
      August 20, 2012 8:27 AM

      Top Men. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoy4_h7Pb3M

    • reply
      August 20, 2012 8:51 AM

      "If you've got 8,000 servers and 1,600 users, how could we ever get to cash flow positive, right?"

      Exactly.

      Also, 1,600 users? Ouch. Maybe that's just the number of people online at any one given point in time but that's pretty sad compared to the 4,531,812 Steam has at its peak. It's like when it comes out in a court case that the ASUS Transformer sold 80,000 units compared to the iPad 3's 3M+ on its first weekend.

      And maybe I'm being naive or working for an understaffed company but 150-200 employees? Does that seem like overkill to anyone else? Or at least overkill compared to having 1,600 users. If it's 200 employees they had eight users for every employee.

      I get that they were probably hiring aggressively waiting for a big explosion of users that never came but I can't picture how the number of users could have increased at such a rate that they decided they needed that much more workforce that quickly.

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      August 20, 2012 9:25 AM

      How did they get 200 employees in the first place working at a company that provides a service nobody wants?

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        August 20, 2012 9:35 AM

        [deleted]

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          August 20, 2012 9:41 AM

          we see how that worked out

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            August 20, 2012 9:43 AM

            To be fair, there's been no reports of OnLive missing payroll. It appears no matter what else they probably had the decency to tell people to stop coming in when they couldn't pay them anymore.

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        August 20, 2012 9:36 AM

        I dunno, but it reminds me of CueCat

        http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000037.html

        Which, long term, was basically a ponzi scheme to bilk investors. The founder/CEO changed his name from J. Jovan Philyaw to J. Hutton Pulitzer and started hocking energy crystals on the web. So yeah... real stand-up guy there.

        I don't think OnLive was an investor ponzi scheme, I just don't think it's an idea that would ever work on the scale it would need to in order to survive.

    • reply
      August 20, 2012 9:48 AM

      [deleted]

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