This pan seems to have a flash in it.

This is a big shakeup for lots of employees. Who would like to share?

So long and thanks for all the fish…

Wow. I’m in disbelief. Working there was really tough but I feel like I’m a better person for it.

While I was there, we always felt as though we were 6 months away from the cusp of greatness / Googleness / profitability.

This may sound cheezy as hell, but my heart goes out to anyone affected by this since there are so many great people there that practically bled for the company giving up their free time and sanity to make it through a project or fire drill.

What does this announcement and everything else we know about the issue tell us about the credibility of all the Triangle organizations that showered Motricity and its key players with awards and accolades?

Motricity seems to have had awfully rich compensation packages at the top levels as well as high discretionary luxury expenditures picked up by the company, whereas the usual startup deal is low current pay and somewhat downscale working conditions balanced by a high eventual payoff.  Maybe the incentives were a little skewed here.  (Why focus on future success if you’re already getting paid?) You’d have expected VCs to have kept a little better eye on their moneys.  I wonder what the top level severance packages will be.  At least they got to stay in nice houses a couple of years and have personal tasks done on the VC dime.  Maybe that’s enough.

Best of luck to all those affected negatively.

Hey gang, keep in touch thru LinkedIn and let me know if there’s any way I can lend a hand.

Best,

Ken

While it’s unfortunate that this is happening, I actually feel sorry for Infospace.  They’re losing out on a ton of very talented individuals.  It’s been my pleasure to work with some of the brightest and most intelligent engineers while at Motricity.  It’s sad that it has to end like this, but I’ve definitely grown as a software developer and as a professional.  I would not trade all of the blood, sweat, and tears for a cushy, boring job at twice the pay...well maybe twice the pay, but you get what I’m trying to say.  It’s challenges like this that grow a person and I’m looking at the impending layoffs as yet another hill to climb and obstacle to overcome.  Ya’ll should know how to reach me via linkedin.com.

What Ken said +1.

Hey Otto, hope you’ve been well. —Ken

It could be worse-- they all could still have jobs at Oasys Mobile…

To “mindlessgarbage”, how “misinformed and not accurate” does last week’s post seem today?

http://www.moconews.net/entry/419-motricity-may-slash-as-many-as-200-employees-may-move-to-bellevue-repor/#69671

The reverse acquisition by INSP solves a bunch of problems. The first thing they should do is move to Bellvue and rebrand the company.

Motricity has burned through much of the technical talent pool in RTP, and the company’s reputation precedes it for future recruiting. Seattle is rich in people skilled Internet/Web, mobile and ecommerce

From a product portfolio standpoint, Infospace’s portal product is light years ahead of the one Motricity has been starving. Migrating portal customers is kind of funny, particularly because some, like Alltel, fled INSP due to hating that company’s business practices. It also consolidates both sides of the AT&T;/Cingular house at one vendor (but for how long?)

Motricity’s commerce platform is fundamentally flawed, held together with not much more than chewing gum and baling wire. INSP’s has _got_ to be better, particularly from the standpoint of facilitating international expansion and back office operations for settlement

The job market in RTP will suddenly get much less tight with all the Motricity folks available, which is good for other employers. The only surprising thing is that it’s taken this long for the company to implode.

For those impacted, I have startups looking for QA, dev and business/sales talent so shoot me a resume. 

Sorry to see this happen to Motricity, glad we didn’t invest though....

RTP VC

I saw the DTC thing crashing a long time ago because no one in the company really cared about the business and it was often treated as the red headed step child. 

As the ex CS Manager I can say that I fought battles everyday with different people within the company to get features which we desperately needed, but I was unable to get anywhere because the focus was always on the MNO side of things and it really took away from what little resources were available. 

When I started at Motricity my team supported DTC only, but over time we took on support for MNE and MNO, which to me still baffles me considering my team had nothing to do with content or the delivery of content, but yet this was our job to support. 

When I left the CS team was supporting all of DTC, AT&T;, Alltel, BellMo, MTV Mobile, BET Mobile, Sprint Game Lobby and all the Off Deck support.  I know that I’m even missing more properties, but my team of 5 people kept things going to the best of our abilities. 

Sure, DTC didn’t make a ton of money, but at least it was making some money for the company.  If the company would have simply dedicated some resources toward the vertical then it could possibly survive on it’s own, but it looks like that day will never come.

For those of you looking for a good STABLE work environment, check out Duke.  If any of you want to contact me then look me up on LinkedIn.com.

Take care,

Slaughter

I learned a lot at Motricity, and do not regret working there. The techies I worked with were great, and because of them my career has gone in a great direction.

I only wish the company focused more on a Core platform instead of practically rewriting Fuel to fit each customer’s needs. It seemed that short term gains were always put above long term goals which resulted in bloated teams, unrealistic development schedules, long hours, and a higher burn rate. It’s a shame.

I wish everyone at Motricity the best of luck in all their future endeavors. If there’s anything I can do to help you guys out, please let me know. You know where to find me.

It’s all over but the cryin’.  I this qualifies as total capitulation on the Durham side.

Since I let last weeks thread go, I figured I should drop a note in this time just to be “friendly”.  Tonight I’ll bust out the Blue Label (yep I’ve still got that bottle) and toast all the other old soldiers. 

Here’s to Taylor and Jud, who gave us five years of employment right through the middle of the first dot-com crash, with lots of fun along the way.  And grudingly to Ryan’s hair, which paid the bills for some great toys (although the Cingular launch nearly did kill me).  And to those still on board, I can assure you, the grass really IS greener out here.

Where are all the nay sayers now?  Again, Motricity was and is for the VC’s.  It was a good ride.  Those who were wiser and didn’t buy into the “kool-aid” left in the past 15 months.  Be sure to look up the Motricity alumni in Linked-In for real placement services.

October 15, 2007
http://www.wral.com/business/local_tech_wire/news/story/1929249/

“In a letter sent to customers, Motricity said its headquarters would remain in Durham.” - liar liar pants on fire!

Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out Ryan.  He’s your nightmare now Bellevue.

I feel for everyone affected by this news...especially those people that moved to RTP to work for Motricity.  No matter how you slice it, this is a huge detriment to the RTP area.

You can blame many people, but one should always look at leadership (or lack thereof) when assessing responsibility.  Even though I have no affiliation with Motricity, it is clear that Ryan Wuerch shares most of the blame...although he would never admit that.

The only good from this debacle is the millions of $$$ poured into the local economy over the last several years.

Good luck to everyone!

I now know my fate, and frankly it’s a relief .  I’ve known that this was one of a few possible ends for at least a year.  Frankly, I’m surprised that the ride lasted this long.

I have a lot of very fond memories of my time spent at Motricity, and the people I met there.  I don’t regret a minute of it.  I came out of it a better person, wiser and more skilled.

It’s been a real pleasure, folks.  Let’s close the books on this one, and start up another

Agreed, the time for the blame game is over.  Its nice to know how this will all unfold.

To second “Out of Fuel,” I met and worked with some of the most amazing, committed, intelligent folks I’ve ever known, and that’s something you certainly don’t find at every job.  Motricity provided a great environment for fostering new ideas and creativity, and whether or not they all made it “live,” the knowledge, skills, and experiences gained here will serve me well for a lifetime.

It certainly saddens me to know that Durham’s doors are closing, but I’ve got no bitterness with the Mo’.  Props to the Durham team on getting us this far, and best of luck in your next endeavors.

Hey Bender, Slaughter, et al…

While I did not work, except on rare occasions, with the non D2C folks, I really miss the camaraderie and the Friday lunches at the Mongolian restaurant!

Sad for me on a personal level, having founded PalmGear, to see it folded into PocketGear (unifying the D2C brands made sense though the deployment left much to be desired IMHO, not I might add the fault of the engineers in all likelihood) and now being sold off as dead weight. :(

Amongst all the chaos and late night rolls came a camaraderie with some other folks that I’ve not seen anywhere else in my career.  The days in 2810 were special because of the amount of work a dedicated team did together (whatever it took for each other) and due to the many long-term friendships that were made there in just a few months - more than in my much longer tenures elsewhere, where we didn’t have access to squid for lunch.  Even the “bosses” were excellent.

To my good friends there who’ll need to start a search soon, the best of luck, and the gra$$ IS indeed greener out there.  Just choose Wisely.

Kenny,

Bali Hai is still running strong, I go at least once a week.

Also, maybe you can resurrect PalmGear.com...I’m sure you could get the rights to PocketGear.com from the Mo at a very good price since they are just going to close the doors most likely.

I know this is not a good situation for many of you, but I hope this affords you the opportunity to explore new ventures.  We’re recruiting-- funded, growing, solid team and you can stay local.  Looking for highly motivated and talented team members with knowledge of large content publishers and advertising operations.  Email us at .  Your confidentiality will be respected.

To all those geting laid off, I’m sorry.  To those who got out early, congrats.

Motricity was way oversold from the beginning.  As much as the Nobility Group was a pyramid scheme, so was motricity.  All of us got caught in the scheme, hoping to achieve the “googleness” of mobile, and make some money. We brought in more people to work at motricity by playing up the hype and the culture, something that never really existed. We left, and the people we brought in got more people to come and work at Motrcity. Take a pay cut, leave your decent paying job, work long hours, and move across the country? For what, a bunch of gay pageant guy groupies who wear ugly suits and shirts?

Now it’s up to the new president who effectively is running the show (one would hope).  Hopefully he’ll get the IPO going, I’d like to recoup the cost of my options I stupidly bought. How long will Ryan and the oklahoma coterie last in seatle? Probably not long, one would think.

Lets see...Today the arrogance and disrespect of Lord Elf displayed to the employess of Motricity was amazing his “strategic rationalization” on how he decided to go with a inferior product was blatantly disrespectful to every employee in the building.  Then to have Wuerchless hiding in the pantry when the slide of the “elimination of 250 Durham employee” jobs was shown.  He is a coward and a liar!  I guess now the company will either buy him out of his ghastly house or forgive his loan while others lose their jobs!!  Way to look out for your employees Wuerchless!!! I guess Nathan and Ryan will move to Seattle with their Miss America’s in tow.

Durham office is closing?  That’s not we’re being told internally.  What’s the true story here.  The press release states “the company is consolidating office locations” but NBC news is saying that the 100 or so employees left in Durham after the layoffs will move to another office.  Why doesn’t someone give us a straight answer.  Some of us do not want to move to Bellvue so if that’s the end game Motricity should let us know now. 

Also I don’t think they’re giving all the pink slips out this week.  Some will be given at a later date but no one knows who will get them.  How do they expect people to continue working when we’re uncertain about where we’ll be working and whether or not we’ll get the pink slip later.  If you’re part of the news media you should be calling Motricity on this. 

Seems like the press is unaware of what is actually going on.

Man, there are some names I haven’t seen in here since forever ago.

It’ll always be Pinpoint to me.  Up until the end, it was simply the best work environment I’d ever been in.  That’s not saying it was perfect, but I sure as hell have some great memories from this company.  Ah, “Fight Club.”

Let’s not bring up San Francisco, however; that’s still embarrassing.

Good luck in your future ventures, guys.  Brockman, are you going to finally get to go to college?  I’ll be hitting the channel tomorrow to find out what you’re up to next.

Agree with some of what you said, except about rationalizing going with an inferior product. Motricity’s portal has always been far behind INSP’s. Can’t speak to mcore or whatever, but they’ made the right decision on Fuel - fundamentally broken, particularly the cms and being built on atg makes it extremely expensive to deploy and impossible to merchandise and manage in-life. Taking the goldpocket stuff along as-is makes a ton of sense and is the only product asset that belongs in the new portfolio.

You know what?  One thing I won’t miss is working with the ATG platform.  What a steaming pile of write-lock-happy, unwieldy garbage.  Good f*ing riddance.

Ah, _now_ I feel better

It was my pleasure to work and learn from a lot of the tech crew. Working at Pinpoint/Mo was easily some of the most fun I had with a tech team and greatly enhanced my working knowledge.

Like Benders, I could have done without that first Cingular rollout. I don’t think sleep is THAT overrated

Taylor and Jud, thanks for starting up Pinpoint and moving my butt up here to RTP

Good luck to everyone that is out looking for new jobs. I’m sure you’ll land someplace with more sane hours.

there’s no way I’ll find another job with a company with so many georgous women unless I go work for a strip club.

One or a team of you insiders should write a book about your Motricity adventure.  There’s a lot to this long story that would be interesting, and instructive, to entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial employees, and vc investors.  In other words, what to avoid.  Statements in posts such as “San Francisco was embarrassing” seem like they have a very interesting back-story.  Answering questions such as why the Fuel platform won so many awards when internally, and in the industry, it seems that Infospace’s mCore was regarded by the cognoscenti as clearly superior would be useful (Were bribes paid?  Did the awarding bodies simply not know anything about the technology?)

To all of you wondering about the inconsistencies in the messages you’re getting, whether the Durham office will remain open, move, or close, when the pink slips will be delivered, what severance packages will be, etc. LEARN FROM YOUR EXPERIENCE SO FAR.  Beware.  Don’t expect anyone to follow through on statements or even “commitments” just out of honor.  Management will do whatever is expedient on each day.  Today, it makes sense to make everyone feel comfortable so they keep working on migrations of systems.  Once moves and migrations of systems are complete, it is likely that “an unexpected deterioriation in market conditions” will force “regrettable and difficult decisions” to lay off all remaining Durham employees and completely close the office some time before the expiration of the nine-month period over which layoffs are now stated to be enacted.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the project plans for systems and customer migrations predict 8.5 months of work.  You should all look out for yourselves.

SWAB thanks for the advice about “inconsistencies in the messages”.  Many who were spared this round of layoffs are still looking for new jobs.  Morale is surely going to be at a all time low for the next few months.

I was just wondering why the press was giving Motricity a pass on these obvious inconsistencies.  Some people are naive enough to rely on the press to get the full story since we know we can’t rely on Motricity management to be completely honest about what’s going on.  Reporting on rumours instead of getting the facts just seems like bad journalism. 

I’ll stick with these posts and my own common sense to figure out what’s actually going on.

For all those who drank from the cool aid, please go see a doctor, you do remember Jim Jones (Ryan) and Jonestown(motricity).

For the love of God man DON’t drink the cool aid

WhatTheBleep is so right.  The press has fawned over each new coat of lipstick put on this pig from day 1.  The local journalists have almost been a tool of the conspiracy.  The weird thing is that digging for the truth would have produced some good, maybe Pulitzer-level, reading:  Shady pasts of top management, only talking about raising capital for 10 years when the usual exit horizon is 5, saying blue-chip banks had been “selected by Motricity” to run an IPO without checking up on the story (no way blue chips would tarnish their reputations with that crew), never checking up on the status of that story, constantly referring to the company as “fast-growing” without any evidence of that, and so on.  It was almost willful ignorance.  But further, why did the area organizations who should have been more in touch than some journalist, offer such a rattle-trap as a shining example of the area’s best?  Why did we install management in key area entrepreneurship roles (CED?), why were they win awards for “best company”, why did top management win entrepreneurship awards?  That’s part of the problem.  Not everyone who wants to learn the stuff that would make them a good employee is going to learn how to see through the smoke being blown, so our press and organizations should help distinguish value-generating endeavors from detritus, they should be more of a discrimatory, evaluative filter rather than just a PR mechanism.  This probably isn’t going to happen so everyone should understand for themselves 2 important things:  1) companies need to be profitable, or need to be able to reach profitability without fundamental, wide-reaching changes in consumer behavior and 2) corporate managers and VCs will lie, about everything, to the extent that anything that comes out of their mouths (or off their memo pads) should be viewed at best as a possibility.

Last time I checked, this is Raleigh-Durham, not exactly the epicenter for world class journalism

What will happen to the brockman?? Dont tell me they will let him go as well!

Taylor will continue to do the same thing as he does every day.........  TRY TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD!

From Pinky and the Brockman

“Taylor will continue to do the same thing as he does every day.........  TRY TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD!”

So...is he hiring any evil henchmen? 

yes, a book......

let’s see it includes ms. america, ryan preaching to the masses about “Good to Great” in his oklahoma preacher’s mode, lots of bad fashion (primarily men), “must protect the company” crazy hr person, a lot of questional and unethical business practices on the part of company, a couple of people who went crazy, sycophants, anal retentive telecom folks, crazy ivy league peeps, lovely mongolian lunches, interoffice romances, heedless nepotism, lots of cool and smart peeps to work with, and lots of needless firing and hirings.

yeah, a movie...writing it now.

Let’s not forget being in the fancy new building for 12+ months, closing the restrooms 2x per day in the middle of the day, and not ever having the soap dispensers filled.  No wonder customer deliverables were such a mess.

Ha! They are deleting comments out of this thread!

Look if you aren’t looking out for yourself and family (if it applies) above all else then you are just as much at fault here. Business is business and the bottom line is the quantitive measure by which business makes decisions end of story. So what you were lied to, are you really surprised? Take some initiative and take care of yourself and get out of this generations feeling of entitlement for being born as it doesn’t exist. There are plenty of other opportunities locally and Careerbuilder along with other sites have tons of jobs posted that are open. Take 10 minutes update your resume and be happy you have a good entry from Motricity and enjoy your 20% raise for finding another job like the rest of us are 8).

Hey, this seems like a pretty cool company - anyone know if they’re hiring?

It was fun while it lasted...i’m going to take a break and figure out what to do next instead of rushing into the next job that comes along...hopefully, there is demand for that kind of stuff here...else it going to be goodbye triangle…

WOW, lots of names in here.  Benders, do you remember when we first turned on Cingular in the middle of the night and watched the logs on the servers start to fly only to see the whole thing crash down the tubes? 

The next few days after that were pure hell, trying to find ways to get this thing going, trying to make it work.  We spent hours and hours in that place, for a week or longer.  Some of us were digging through the code trying to make it more efficient, some of us were working on hardware.  I was trying to find ways to get servers that normally take 90 days for arrival.  Somehow, some way, we were able to make it all happen.  Joe V, Benders, Taylor, Kramer, Josh and the rest of the group.  That is the best, most talented group of people I ever worked with.  Once the PBH train rolled in, the fun was over. Sad.  I hope the current management will take this as a lesson and make changes to their style.

Either way, those days when we first turned up Cingular were some of the best in my career. I will never forget it.

Thorpedo

well as someone who was with the company back when they where in Franklin, TN it kills me how far Ryan and his band have continue to sucker investors and sell BS.  I started with the expectation that hard work and creativity would be rewarded.  After long hours and sacrifice half the office was let go because of declining sales (based on poor policy/business practice being forced by Ryan).  All while this is going on, Ryan is building a multimillion dollar home, bought a brand new Mercedes and spent countless dollars on providing window dressing for the company instead of building a core business system.  Everyone managed this company via spread sheets simply because he would not spend any money to provide business value. 

Anyway, it sounds like the Durham folks are getting the same shaft the rest of the folks that get hit in the wake of the Wuerch express.  He comes in with visions of grandeur, spends the least amount of money on the actual business yet ensures he and his family/friends are taken care of.  Ryan is very talented but his skill set is not suitable for running a company. If he was actually college educated he might have been one heck of a lawyer..