{"id":3147,"date":"2008-10-22T20:40:02","date_gmt":"2008-10-23T00:40:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=3147"},"modified":"2008-10-22T20:40:02","modified_gmt":"2008-10-23T00:40:02","slug":"mahalo-now-means-goodbye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/10\/22\/mahalo-now-means-goodbye\/","title":{"rendered":"Mahalo now means “goodbye”"},"content":{"rendered":"

So Jason Calacanis has brought down the hammer on some employees at Mahalo, his “people-powered search” startup — and took the extraordinary step of returning to blogging<\/a> momentarily to announce the news, after having made a big show of turning his back on it. In typical Jason fashion, he even included what is becoming a kind of blogosphere in-joke: The headline of his post is “Tough times; hard decisions,” a wording that Techmeme’s Gabe Rivera notes is becoming a recurring theme<\/a>. And if you think Jason didn’t know that, then you don’t know Jason Calacanis.<\/p>\n

The cuts at Mahalo aren’t really that surprising, given Jason’s widely-circulated email newsletter about how<\/a> the downturn is going to hit startups hard (something Ashkan of WatchMojo thinks was a clear sign layoffs were coming<\/a> at Mahalo). But how many people did he actually cut, and why? That’s a murky question indeed. Some reports said 30 per cent of the staff were shown the door, and Nick Carlson<\/a> at Silicon Alley Insider said 11 out of 20 (or maybe 25), which is closer to 50 per cent. TechCrunch said 10 per cent<\/a>, which is the number Jason uses.<\/p>\n

But it’s worth wondering just who is included in those staffing numbers<\/a>. It’s not clear, for example, whether they include the 20-odd people working in the Manila office in the Philippines, the ones Allen Stern of Centernetworks mentions in his post<\/a> (complete with a photo, which now appears to have been removed from Flickr). Some sources say that the number of full-time paid employees has been cut by 50 per cent<\/a>, leaving a small number along with unpaid volunteers and freelancers on contract.<\/p>\n

Regardless of the number, is it enough to get Mahalo the kind of scale that will make it a viable search site? I think Ash has a point when he says<\/a> that the company’s current strategy pretty much consists of trying to whip together links and a blurb about whatever is hot on Google Trends, and then hope that Google indexes it quickly and it shows up high in search results. Is that a viable strategy? I confess that I don’t really know.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/b><\/p>\n

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch has posted the text<\/a> of Jason’s email newsletter, despite the fact that the email specifically says “Do Not Reprint.” As Erick notes in a comment<\/a> on his post: “He is the CEO of a startup that just went through a layoff today, and he emailed his thoughts on the matter to almost 9,000 people. This is not a private email.” Jason then steps in to ask<\/a> that it be taken down, and threatens to send a DMCA takedown notice to TechCrunch’s ISP (something he has reportedly done to others in the past for similar reasons). Mike Arrington’s response is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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So Jason Calacanis has brought down the hammer on some employees at Mahalo, his “people-powered search” startup — and took the extraordinary step of returning to blogging momentarily to announce the news, after having made a big show of turning his back on it. In typical Jason fashion, he even included what is becoming a … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Mahalo now means “goodbye””<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3147\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}