Motricity Saga Continues: Company Sues Former Top Executive
When Steve Elfman, one of Motricity’s highest-ranking executives, left to join Sprint Nextel earlier this year, it appeared to be a bad sign for Motricity, which had just paid $135 million for Elfman’s company, *InfoSpace* Mobile. But in an interview with us a couple months later, Motricity’s CEO Ryan Wuerch sounded upbeat, and suggested some potential upsides to his departure: “He
Wow…that's a great way to get new business out of Sprint. Maybe RW is counting on the monetary penalties as his next round of funding.
The truth is Elfman got totally duped by RW and co. on the numbers. What he thought he was getting in limited disclosure, versus what he later discovered were two different things. Shame on both sides! The real losers are all the hard-working employees that made the two companies what they WERE. It's unfortunate that greed and narcissism got in the way. It could have been a successful merger. Now it's a complete disaster. Oh yeah, where was uncle Carl in all this? Icahn asleep at the wheel or punch drunk on RW's Kool-Aid?
Threatening ex-employees, suing to get out of contracts, and now suing Elfman for cutting out after cutting up Motricity. I'm not surprised to hear this.
ahhhh….the gift that keeps giving. When was the last time anything was said about Motricity that related to the the growth of the business. If this saga weren't so entertaining, it would be pathetic.
Carl – if you're out there, would you please escort Mr, Wuerch back to the circus, they are missing a clown.
Wow did I read that right? Motricity has raised $500m; for what is a simple business. RW – you're a genius!! Looks like the investors in Motricity went to the same business schools as the guys running the mortgage industry :-)
Someone needs to capture all the comments posted on the threads about Motricity on this site and post it someplace… like MotricitySucks.com. Oh yeah, I wonder if Handango still owns that address? Remember when they bought that back when Motricity announced their new name changing from PowerByHand? Hilarious.
WOW – Handango STILL owns MotricitySucks.com. That is hysterical. They need to put something up there like a redirect or thread list for this site. WhoIs info:
Registrant:
Handango, Inc
ATTN: MOTRICITYSUCKS.COM
c/o Network Solutions
P.O. Box 447
Herndon, VA. 20172-0447
It would be really interesting if a reporter could do a little research, read the court documents, and tell us more details of what's going on. Motricity has been in the balderdash business for so long that these court documents, where they can't get away with just making up stories and numbers, are typically really enlightening. One question I have is whose decision it was to file this lawsuit. Dollars to doughnuts it was Uncle Carl. I expect he wanted some professional, experienced, educated management for his new baby. In addition, from what we read, RW was probably happy to see SE go, probable even encouraged it sotto voce, and probably wouldn't want to go into litigation, given it's propensity to air dirty laundry for all the world (customers, employees, etc.).
When is this thing just going to dry up and blow away, anyway? The economy must have really shut down the sort of impulse buys Motricity facilititates, and all the new projections for new cell phone sales (or lack thereof) must have a HUGE impact on Motricity's hockey stick (I'm sure) revenue and profit projections.
Here are the court documents:
http://dw.courts.wa.gov/index.cfm?fa=home.casesummary&crt_itl_nu=S17&casenumber=08-2-23585-8&searchtype=sName&token=0A642133D698D3523FC10B89C921E9A4&dt=202CC18B0FB1DB41D6DD9B7CCCAD5494
I'll second Sadbuttrue's comments about discovering one bad thing after another about the NC operations. Unfortunately with MOT as the buyer, the INSP team really wasn't able to do much due diligence before the transaction closed. MOT wanted the sr mgmt team but was dumb in not making them staying around a condition of the transaction. SE was smart to bail, as were the others on the mgmt team (Chaplin, Reisenauer, Thorkildsen). I hear their lawyer left after she learned that RW threatened to sue SE despite it blowing up the Sprint relationship. Now they've actually gone and done it. Amazing.