Woot To Be Acquired By Amazon
woot.com
woot.com
being a good leader is always coolspecifically to yours, no, its not cool to fire people, but i would rather hear well rationalized case for deciding to let me go (assuming it wasn't performance related) instead of a cleverly written kthxbai. still, that even that wouldn't be cool.
My last boss was like that, which is why he delegated the hiring and firing to a "hired gun". He was a good guy for the most part, but that was the most difficult thing to watch as I got up into management and saw what was going on. He would make the calls to have someone canned, delegate down to the "gun" and then put on a face of disbelief and contempt in front of everyone as though it wasn't his choice to fire the person.
You may question, as did I, how people could buy this circus act, but it worked quite well. When anyway would question the CEO as to why he doesn't fire the "gun" if he doesn't agree with what he's doing, he would always comment that when you put someone in a position like that you can't undermine what they do. For better or for worse, you have to back them and their decisions. Which is true, but was also just a smoke screen for what was really going on to those none the wiser.
I could only reply, "where do I sign up?"
Hopefully, Woot will leverage Amazon's cloud infrastructure to avoid the dreaded "server unavailable" messages.
...we’re geeked about the opportunities to tap into that knowledge and those resources, especially on the technology side.
According to http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_volume_is_1_million_dolla..., 110 million in twenties is about 220 cubic feet.
According to http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/reviews/healey/2010-03-1..., a 2011 Hyundai Sonata has about 120 cubic feet of passenger and cargo space.
So, assuming TechCrunch is right, the Woot CEO is wrong. It's actually close to TWO Hyundais (Hyundai?) full of twenties.
(OK, maybe one after-tax Hyundai)
We ran. It was later that night when Amazon came by the house and said they liked our style and also wanted to get that money we owed them for messing up the chrome. We like to think that our relationship with Amazon will continue at this level for many, many, many years to come."
I just thought this deserved a special space on the HN thread.
The deal-sealer for me was the video of the monkey rapping about it: http://www.woot.com/Blog/ViewEntry.aspx?Id=13391
Apple and Microsoft surely don't, at least.
I can't even decide which paragraph I love best.
(edited in an attempt to copy/paste a quote.)
Other than that, we plan to continue to run Woot the way we have always run Woot, with a wall of ideas and a dartboard. From a practical point of view, it will be as if we are simply adding one person to the organizational hierarchy, except that one person will just happen to be a billion-dollar company that could buy and sell each and every one of you like you were office furniture.
Congrats guys!
As completely ridiculous as it may sound, being able to log in with my Amazon account and one-click™ that amazingly cheap recertified Roomba is probably going to work on me.