Gomen nasai

This is just great…OSTK is doing a sexy underpants something or other….just amazing

settlements-

And that has what to do with Overstock’s business operations, it’s quarter-after-quarter-after-quarter array of excuses for why losses are growing and not shrinking.

Jeff didn’t say a word about share price.

Maybe the Sith Lord conspired with Oracle and TeraData to manipulate that price of the IT systems in order to drive up costs and lower Overstocks earnings?

i can’t make any sense out of any of it . I mean Patrick said he was about to pull a rabbit out of a hat…Whats that ? Another Diamond deal ?

chris,

two things

1. I find it amusing that Jeff does tout one side of the story and yet completely neglects when bad news hits the ‘other side’. Do you not question why Jeff never revealed the Bloomberg article but did the call? Do you not find it odd that Overstock had to fire a mole within the ranks that fed information to the —- short sellers? I wonder if they shorted on info from the mole that it would be ‘insider trading’.

2. I bring it up because Jeff brought up short sellers in his presentation of material.

Now you want to shoot every disagreeable messenger – go ahead – I just find it odd that matthews here only presents teh side that is favorable to ‘his boys’ and never presents the unfavorable side of things as they happen.

Anyone else notice how Patrick admitted they could face a “cash crunch” next August when they need to bring in inventory for the fall and holiday selling season. He said there were a couple things they can do to get around it though. Like what? Sell equity? Raise debt? Defer payables? Decrease marketing? None of those seem very palatable to me…

I wonder how much money ostk spends on PR. Since Jeff and Pat duked it out on cbnc, ostk’s price has tanked. Some of these counter arguments to Jeff sound very PRish. It’s like Jeff has started a fire… someone go try to put it out. But then again, Jeff and others were just pointing out the obvious operating problems. No conspiracies… just facts and analyses. Corporations must be scared of blogs like that of Jeff’s, but investors probably love it. Things are definitely changing.

Well did the analysts upgrade ? Increase thier price target ? ….Increase thier numbers for 06 ? Sad, ain’t it ?

Rocker or Gradient answer the suit yet ?

Goldman offered me 50k today that I could borrow. I got too busy with other things but probably worked out as the stock rallied and I did nothing. I haven’t ever shorted this stock but considering everything eventually it’s lower. I am sure Dr. Byrne will call GS and figure out how to secure this 50k.

After briefly reading OSTK’s press release of their 3rd qtr earnings, the first thought which came to mind is that they nearly triple the amount spent on upgrading ERP software and got three quarters of losses in EPS to show for it. Guess they should have used software from SAP to manage their inventory problems…

The other thing that is interesting about OSTK is how much of their total revenue (nearly 59% in the 3rd qtr) comes from their fulfillment partners. Since sales from OSTK’s fulfillment partners have been “slow out of the gate” this year due to OSTK’s ERP problems, one has to wonder how much OSTK will have to spend in marketing expenses to continue keeping its existing fulfillment partners “happy” (if you could call them that right now – I could be wrong though….)

gvtucker, i think the call was rigged. i think all of thier calls are rigged. i think the buying we saw during the conference call was “arranged” days before the conference call . I think Mary Helburns ( suing Gradient and Rocker ) NFI yahoo board post number 362299 just about says it all . ..And while i drive a fork lift for a living and can’t help but wonder why Patrick went into this low margin liquidation business in the first place. I mean wasn’t he working for Buffet ? Doesn’t Buffet want high margin businesses that do or sell stuff people want ? My guess is the business is dying while the story is getting all the growth.

It’s my understanding that Mr. Byrne went to several media sources before he found one (Bloomberg) who was willing to listen to his tall stories about the SEC “probing” Gradient. No other journalist would print that story since they could find NO corroboration for it. That’s a legal term for proof.

I find it most amusing that Mr. Byrne’s father showed up to take command right before a nasty earnings report. I wonder what he thinks of his child’s vivid imagination.

Patrick said the IT transplant troubles weren’t the softwares fault . He said he ” bit off more technology projects than my colleagues could chew” ..So what does Patrick do ? He gives IT head Schwegman a few months off . ..Yep, i’m a idiot. Patrick also claims he isn’t concerned with stock price but spends $47,000 on call options. Yep, i’m a idiot.

you can listen to the Coach’s first interveiw @

http://www.startupnation.com/pages/radio/RD_July16_2005.asp

Jeff, What are you thinking ? Patrick either leaves OSTK or becomes nothing but a figure head . The suit against Rocker and Gradiant goes away while Patrick goes after the naked shorters ? OSTK folds up all the Patrick projects and tries to slow the burn ? . ….Hard for me to see why a guy in his 70’s would want to deal with this miss …Beats me

It’s strange:

I think Patrick wants to believe the SEC believes his tall tales. I believe guys like Patrick provide amusement for the SEC.

There is no corroboration that the SEC is probing Gradient per my sources.

StarTribune

” SEC Activities May Be a Bit More Open, Thanks to Lawsuit” .

SECinsights ( Herb would site them now and than ) won a important legal victory the other day. I tried posting this along with the link 3 times perhaps now it will work.

This SECinsight info is serious stuff

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=172901477

Overstock also migrated from an Oracle 9i database to Oracle 10g and shifted its reporting from operational systems to a data warehouse from Terradata, a division of NCR Corp.

“You don’t do several major IT projects simultaneously,” said AMR analyst Jim Shepherd. “It typically happens because you don’t test and phase in the projects and systems slow enough. That is what gets companies into trouble, not the actual software.”

Oracle had told Overstock it would take between 12 and 18 months to install its financial package. Overstock didn’t listen and did it in five and a half months.

Other IT projects going on at the same time included moving some applications from running on Microsoft Windows to open source operating platforms Red Hat and Linux Novell Suse. There also were inefficiencies in Overstocks internally developed search engine and analytics software known internally as Propeller.

Patrick is the best _________.

“When we meet someone with real brains and energy and the right character, we hire them even without giving them a job.”
Byrne describes one executive who was hired after taking a year off to ski in Park City. “She was basically a ski bum,” he said. But Byrne noted that she was also a Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth and had worked at Goldman Sachs. “I hired her with no job and said, ‘Drift around for a couple of months and figure out what you’re going to do.’” The woman went on to become VP of Marketing, said Byrne, noting that many of the people he’s hired this way have proved themselves natural leaders in the
company.

http://www.redcoatpublishing.com/features/f_07_04_Cover.asp

Sadly, the Information Week story is something that we see far too often in IT.

A top exec reads a magazine article, and gets what one of my mentors refered to as a “HBI” — a half-baked idea. It is then presented to an IT or project management type with a deadline for completion, before any real analysis is done.

More often than not, the same exec has more than one HBI. And the risk of one poorly defined project is multiplied by the risks of many others. A really bad situation becomes inevitable.

This is why having a sharp, experienced CIO who understands the risks of such projects and is willing and able to say “no.” Having a young guy with no experience doing these kinds of projects tends to really stoke a CEO’s ego, because all he hears is “yes! Great idea! We’re on it!” He never hears that a project failure could kill the business, or any other suggestions of caution.

Happens all the time. In most organizations, the inexperienced guy gets caught and maybe learns the lessons before he moves up to the top. Occasionally you get a situation like this, where the CEO decides he likes somebody, and gives him responsibility he has no training for. (The other link, about Byrne’s hiring practices tends to suggest that this is the case here.) The results are predictable.

-btc

another priceless one was:

“CEO is not a KING”

I guess that there needed to be some clarification for him to teach this to a flock.

Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne is hands down the most eccentric, oddball persona on Wall Street.

Caught in a catatonic state of corporate paranoia, CEO Pat Byrne has repeatedly claimed that there is a “conspiracy” against him and his company, an online liquidator that is mired in operational woes.

Overstock recently filed an amended complaint in California State Superior Court charging Rocker (a well known shortseller) along with the Arizona research firm Gradient Analytics, claiming that Rocker was behind “a wide-scale predatory campaign of knowingly distributing false, and overtly biased, written reports about Overstock (OSTK) to disparage Overstock and enrich themselves.”

On an acrimonious 8/11 conference call, Byrne powerpointed a network of more than two dozen fund managers, journalists, law firms and regulatory agencies he claimed were conspiring to drive Overstock’s shares to the ground.

Here’s the well known kicker: Byrne claimed in the same conference call that Rocker and other alleged conspirators were taking directions from a mastermind that Byrne called a “Sith Lord,” a reference to a villain in the “Star Wars” movies.

The Sith Lord?

It gets better — A recent note to shareholders had Byrne coughing up even more humorous nonsense: “Gomen nasai. Q3 was rough. My bad. I bit off more technology projects than my colleagues could chew. The last bite, an ERP implementation, was one bite too many, and we choked on it. “

In other words: If CNBC announces another live interview with Byrne, you’ll want to make sure the TIVO is on.

On a more serious note, managerial eccentricity and oddball behavior should raise red flags, or yellow ones at the very least.

Pat Byrne seems to be very good at scapegoating externalities and dressing his company’s ($650 million dollar market value) shortcomings in convoluted tropes and pop culture innuendo.

Share are suffering; a quick glance at OSTK’s daily chart this morning revealed a major downtrend.

We’re forecasting further erosion in Overstock.com’s shares until further notice.

Nice work. I’m counting around a dozen congratulatory messages from credibility, an equal number from its_strange….wow, half the posts are from two people who are filled with joyous admiration for whatever kool aid Jeff is selling. All willing to forget the gaffs of depicting a VP as a stripper, the shrinking hedge fund mystery and Jeff’s unwillingess to directly answer direct questions about his fund’s eroding value…

Nice lovefest you all have going here, or should I say you three or four?

I’m guessing everyone here is short OSTK given the jubilation over every piece of questionable news.

Is Gradient the subject of an SEC investigatiion? Fair question. It is a yes or a no. Anyone know the answer? I have a source that says they are, and it is real.

Jeff? Answer this. Why is your fund smaller than it was three years ago, and why won’t you answer straight, simple questions with straight answers?

And for everyone. Why do you think that the same 3 or 4 people have to post repetitively reinforcing statements to Jeff’s every utterance? Why are his blunders and dishonesties forgotten, and requests for his performance shrugged off, almost as though it is paramount for the discussion to stay “on point” for whatever negative Jeff is attempting to spin; usually OSTK related?

I’d like to know whether his fund is bigger or smaller than it was 3 years ago. I’d like to know if his stock insights have resulted in a net shrinkage or increase in his fund size since 2002, as a test of his believability and his worth. I’d like to know why he won’t address this.

I’m not a Yahoo message board posting type, but I’m also not an idiot, and after reading the last 8 of Jeff’s blog pieces on OSTK, I smell a rat, and I’m calling it.

So how bout it Jeff? Straight answer?

After reading the money.cnn story today I noticed that caption from Byrne regarding the dog food anf I couldn’t remember where I read that before.
Here’s a cut and paste from Bob O’Brien that sounds very similar:

Where does Grandma who now is eating Alpo benefit from a centi-millionaire hedge fund manager having his illegal trading strategy kept from public scrutiny?

What a coincidence.
I am speechless.

I have no knowledge of Jeff’s fund.

But I do have knowledge of how funds grow and shrink. And more often than not, such growth or shrinkage depends on the needs and desires of the partners and general partner in particular and are not always reflective of performance.

Many funds that significantly outperform do not grow, because the general partner caps the fund size at a certain level. If the fund grows bigger than the general partner desires, the fund simply returns profits to the limited partners. This often occurs when a manager wants to keep his portfolio down to a managable number of positions and wants each position to be of a tradable size.

Some funds shrink when a major partner (sometimes one of the general partners) decides to move on for one reason or another and the capital is not immediately replaced. Often such moves have nothing to do with performance. Retirement, job changes and other life changes can have a big influence, especially at funds catering to high net worth individuals rather than institutions.

And yes, some funds shrink because they lose money. As Jim Cramer has noted accurately on many occasions, these funds tend not to stick around for more than a year or so after the loss is suffered. It’s a brutal business that way.

So, since Jeff’s fund has not disappeared, I’ll presume that he’s doing OK, if not great. While it’s not taking much to ourperform the index this year, there are a lot of firms I’m aware of that have made bad bets and will probably fold in the near future.

-btc

btc,

That Fortune article by Bethany McLean was interesting to say the least. I thought that I was reading an excerpt from a John Grisham novel.

Well, I think it’s odd, but it’s hardly illegal. Hedge funds certainly try to get to people inside companies they’re investigating and I can’t really see the illegality of using your own employees to try to figure out what the hedge funds are doing or why. So long as she didn’t provide misleading or proprietary information, it would be legal.

The fact that he spoke with Bethany McLean and apologized over his former comments impresses me. At the very least, he’s not completely off his rocker (no pun intended) though perhaps a bit too thin skinned for CEO of a public company.

That said, the fact that he’s not a bad guy does not necessarily translate into him being a good CEO or OSTK being a good company. Lots of great companies have been run by nasty people, and lots of great people have run bad companies into the ground.

I think the last page or so of the story gets into the real problem with this company, from an investment perspective. For better or worse it’s unpredictable, and the CEO’s strategy has changed more than once. Is he focused on getting profitable as fast as possible? Is he going to continue delaying profitablity in order to grow revenues? What’s the end game? And when is he going to change his mind again?

For better or worse, the answers to those questions remain unclear. Until the management clarifies where they are going and why you should own the stock, smart investors are going to continue bailing out and shying away.

http://www.wrhambrecht.com/tradfo/ostk200411/ostk20041117.pdf

Hey OSTK , Hey Wallstreet , What else is there ? You just don’t turn 42 years old and start acting like nut case. You just don’t turn 42 years old and start lying and bullying people . Patrick’s history must be filled with this kind of stuff. Starting years and years ago . ………This McLean story is just amazing. …

Please take note Byrne got word that former employees were talking for money and he sent Stormy in to Rockers office hoping he could learn something. You recall Patrick claimed he fired someone who was a “mole” for the hedge funds ? …i would LOVE to know the facts and what this mole has to say ..

I don’t think the market is the manic depressive partner, I think its the barber.

The barbershop story sounds like a liquidation technique of the 18 DotCom Garage Sales.

Can you imagine your child comes home from the university that you’re paying $20,000 a year for and tells you : “Daddy guess want I learned today about the market and barbershops from Professor Byrne.”

If any parents of those students are reading this, I apoligize and I do not mean to poke fun at this. I know that it is not a laughing matter when children who are barely young enough to vote are being taught that these are the Business Ethics of the market.

Where are the Board of Directors of that University? Where is the chair of the Business department?

Credibility,

Virtually all offerings allow the underwriters a lot of lattitude in what they do to simultaneously meet demand and maintain a stable, orderly market after the offering. The ability to naked short in those circumstances is one of the exceptions to the rules against naked shorting. I believe such naked shorts need to be bought in relatively soon after the offering is concluded.

Market makers and NYSE specialists — who are required to maintain a market for all their securities at all times — are also allowed to naked short when they have no actual securities to sell and can’t get a borrow. There is also a requirement for covering the short relatively quickly. The idea is to be a shock absorber when very short term disruptions occur and to spread the impact of a short-term shock over the course of a few days.

If these activities are done in a legitimate manner — and my experience with market-makers suggests they generally are — then the shorts should never be out there for more than a few days.

-btc

Yeah, that was that Fortune article linked by btc. It’s definitely a good read. I couldn’t believe the email he had sent to Ms. McLean about giving Goldman traders, for lack of a better word, oral pleasure (not the word he used in the email). The best part was how he sarcastically asked that doing so wasn’t paying off. Oh man, no movie or book is as good as the reality of this whole thing. Insults, conspiracies, secret plots… you have all the components of a great thriller novel in the making.

I noticed on the Stanford University link that Dr. Byrne’s bio mentions Byrne was named to Business Week’s list of the 25 most influential people in e-Business.

Others that you may remember from that list:

Business Week
OCTOBER 1, 2002
The changes of fortune took their toll on last year’s BusinessWeek e.biz 25 list of the most influential people in the industry. Jeffrey K. Skilling, then-CEO of Enron Corp. won his place on the list by building an online energy trading operation. Now he spends his days pondering his fate in the wake of his company’s ignominious demise. Thomas Middelhoff, former CEO of Bertelsmann, has also exited his company. Now the company is retreating from his Web initiatives, including his risky bet on file-sharing pioneer Napster and his pursuit of an online book retailing empire. Stuart Wolff of HomeStore.com (HOMS ) is gone, too — forced out after the online realtor made huge earnings restatements that left it with billions in losses.

if this BURDEN guy is correct, that statement should go over real well at STANFORD’s next fundraiser.

“We were in this 500-person union hall in Redding, Penn., and everyone wanted to rip my head off,” said Byrne. “After the third person threatened me I said, ÔOkay, I’ll step outside right now, and if anyone can take me, I’ll concede this issue.” There were plenty of takers, but the president of the Union Hall stepped up and stopped it.

He was also mentored by “a funny man who’d come to the house with a beat-up suitcase and off-the-rack suits.” The man turned out to be investing legend Warren Buffett.

Sure, Byrne admits that his father’s business success (as CEO of GEICO, Fireman’s Fund Insurance, and FundAmerica) and being coached by Buffett gave him what he calls “a lot of tailwind in life,”

Nothing like dropping a name around!

You Can’t Believe it’s America

The “game” Byrne refers to is something he insists is a massive payola scheme for the big players. He described it this way:

“Suppose you drive a $30,000 Lexus and you hire me to go sell it. Then I sell it to Joe and I come back to you and say, ‘Sorry I could only get ten grand for it.’ Then you find out that Joe flipped it the next day for thirty grand. Now, have I done a good job for you? Are you happy with me? No.

“You asked me to get a good price for the car and I got a third of what I could’ve raised for you. Now, suppose it turns out that Joe’s actually my cousin and I went over to Joe’s and mowed his lawn and he paid me $10,000 for it. Well, now you’d understand what had really gone on. He’d given me a kickback. That’s Wall Street banking.

“When a company hires a bank to sell a chunk of itself and the next day the stock triples, why aren’t the companies screaming about the money they left on the table?”

Because they’re going over to mow Joe’s lawn?

“Exactly. They deliberately under-price the stock and shovel it to their friends at certain pension funds who get the quick ride up then flip it in the first week. It’s understood they have to shovel 40 or 50 percent back to the investment banks that let them do it. Every time a large bank took out one of the Internet blockbusters you could check a week or two later and find that those same pension funds were trading shares of some unrelated instrument and paying two dollars a share commission. You and I can get on Ameritrade and pay a penny a share per trade, so why are the experts paying excess commissions?”

Because they’re paying their kickback?

“Yes. Putting an IPO onto the market at a deliberately undervalued price creates guaranteed profits, and any time you have that set-up you’re going to have kickbacks. It doesn’t matter if you’re in Manhattan or Paraguay. I have yet to meet anyone in the banking industry who will deny that this is the way it works. To fix Wall Street you have to start by fixing the IPO allocation process.”

In February 2002 Overstock.com filed its preliminary prospectus with the SEC. At the time, the NASDAQ had fallen from 2200 to 1600. About a month later Overstock started to get its filings back from the SEC.
“This is a pretty ugly three week period,” said Byrne. “You start getting comments back from the SEC examiners. These are hard-working young lawyers, and they have a very legitimate job trying to protect the public from fraud, but man, they are sure picky

“I don’t want to sound like a do-gooder,” said Byrne. “I’m a rapacious capitalist 23 hours a day, but for one hour a day I’d like to do something good. It’s the first time I’ve ever been able to match up the business side up my life with the philosophy I spent years studying. Worldstock lets me synthesize my fractured interests.”

http://www.wasatchdigitaliq.com/parser.php?nav=article&article_id=50&page_num=3&PHPSESSID=eb59f1c35d50e0dfa7cd3322b5f7832a

Sucker. Jeff found the Stormy story in Findlaw and posted it. I also did. When it was pointed out to him the Findlaw the story was wrong he removed it. But you know this don’t you ? And if you want real nonsense to read go check out Phil’s ( Bob O’Brien ) blog . He has been very busy the last 24 hours throwing out one canard after another. . I asked him why no mention of OSTK lastest earnings report and why he reviewed his own book and he removed the post.

Jeff,

While you and your “integrity minded” cohorts continue to berate Overstock.com for IT problems it appears what problems Overstock had was not necessarily unusual.

http://www.plantautomation.com/content/news/article.asp?docid=%7b20374E94-4557-436C-9F61-BA8E6F5934C1%7d&VNETCOOKIE=NO

Just to keep things in a more fair and objective view.

It is certainly true that many companies have had IT failures. I’ve been involved in several myself. Everybody who’s been in the business for any length of time has has similar experiences.

What I find unique about OSTK is not that they had a project go bad. It’s that their project portfolio management was so bad that they found themselves doing multiple high-risk projects all at once, compounding the risks of any single failure. Any seasoned It person knows you just don’t do that.

This is far from routine and is reflective of the lack of proper due diligence and risk analysis at the highest levels of IT and corporate management.

-btc

“Diferent topic: for the record, I did not call Stormy Simon an exotic dancer–the Utah Supreme Court document available on “Findlaw.com” summarizing her part in a murder trial did.”

Nice try Jeff,
below is a response to a poster on this very blog who questioned your assertion that Ms. Simon was stripper.

“”mfairview”: I have proof they are the same person, and if you Overstockians ever got off your rear ends and did some work you could do the same. All it took was a simple phone call. But, what the heck, it’s easier to sit there and post all day on the message boards than do real work.”

By the way, your claim that Patrick is the one that has perpetuated this myth is ridiculous. You put it out there on your blog and now it is all over the internet. In fact, some of the same people I’ve seen supporting your drivel here, still refer to Ms. Simon as “whore”, “stripper”, “exotic dancer”, etc., in their posts on the Yahoo message boards.

Great work Jeff!

Bipolar Disorder
Manic-Depressive Illness

Characteristics of the Illness

“delirious” or psychotic mania: severe overactivity, hostile attitude, assaultiveness(reading,PA), paranoid delusions(Sith Lords) or hallucinations

Feelings
irritability, excessive anger over trivial things, overreacting to stimuli,hostile

Thoughts
inflated self-esteem, grandiosity, thinking one is more powerful than one really is

ideas pour in at an incredible pace and mental associations after associations occur so that speech can be full of jokes, plays on words and amusing irrelevancies

misinterpretation of events, distortion of the meaning of ordinary comments

poor judgment, one will probably not recognize that one is ill and is apt to refuse treatment, will blame others for things that go wrong

loss of touch with reality – hearing voices (hallucinations) or having strange ideas (delusions) about being persecuted, controlled

Behaviour
involvement in grandiose money making schemes

compulsive desire to be socially involved prompting telephone calls to friends at all hours of the night often to discuss plans

overspending, giving money away,

socially intrusive, headstrong, targeting the self-esteem of others,

may want sexual intercourse several times a day, may pick up partners indiscriminately (blind dates on airplanes comes to mind)

A possible clue to the “Sith Lord”
Read what “Southie”(Sharon) had to say in this thread:

http://forums.auctions.overstock.com/viewtopic.php?t=6405&sid=d2d73bc057bbc010fc5aad017c2d34c7

customer complaints at consumer affairs:

http://www.consumeraffairs.com/online/overstock.html

Sending Simon into Rockers office is beyond dumb . Thier lawsuit is over but that isn’t what this is about anyway. Phil has been outlining what i believe is a book / script on his website / blog . Sending Simon over to Rocker is about that, the script . Patrick has been waisting his time and stockholder money with the hopes he and Phil can create this novel based on a “true story” . Phil ( already has two books under his belt ) is busy writing it now. Patrick with produce and perhaps play a part in it. ..BTW , Phil knows the movie making business as well. ..Go review Phils past comments on his site . He clearly isn’t interested in OSTK . He never posted one word about those 3rd quarter earning . Its all cloak and dagger stuff . Stuff made for the make believe world of Hollywood . Sending this kid Simon into Rockers office thinking he could bag this big brained seasoned pro was the tip off. Its all about the book.

When the stockholders realize what going on hear the lawsuits will truely break ground

So if what American Sucker is saying is true… Overstock.com is a great company with great fundamentals and everyone who is not long or positive about this company is in on it together and hates America.

You know i’m wondering if OSTK offered Gradient/ Rocker to drop the suit if they agreed not to sue ? …That Simon nonsense is just to dump to have a jury learn of it

Patrick sends Simon into Rockers office….Well now i understand why Patricks life long lawyers ( Bracewell & Giuliani ) aren’t handling the case. Its time to get real Wallstreet.

a Phil Saunder’s special

http://travelingdrunk.net/stories/18/nigerian-scammer-baiting

the best scammer is the best scam baiter.

HOT! HOT!

sanders

Joined: 17 Sep 2005
Posts: 18

Posted: Sat Oct 08, 2005 6:19 pm Post subject: Re: Overstock Commercials & STR

——————————————————————————–

O is just a little too weird.
It seeems that their VP of techie stuff is now gone which
is probably a good thing. And then there is that business
of him selling his stock before the rest of the world knew
their IT structure was a mess and not working.
In this post from the fool.com Patrick explains the sale
by stating that the kid needed some money to buy a home.
I dunno–he’s 30, single, made $175,000 a year base salary, was living
in a motel for 5 years, and he couldn’t swing a down payment?
Housing prices must be really high in Salt Lake City. 🙂
It’s all kind of insulting to our intelligence.
Sanders

D) IT? Stuff happens. Shawn is awesome, and got us through a massive re-architecture over the last two years. First, he got us through a period when our then current systems were redlining so badly we were in danger of imploding. Second, he got us onto a set of systems that scale horizontally and vertically for the foreseeable future (see my Q2 conference call for greater detail). Third, we had reached the point where our code writing was log-jammed: it was taking longer and longer to add new features besides so much of the code was just hard-wired patches. This is not completely fixed yet, incidentally: still, large elements of our code base have gotten transformed, made modular, upgraded, or been replaced by professional third party packages. Not bad for two years’ work. And not bad for a tiny fraction of the cost of our competitors.
That said, Shawn ahs been begging to step down for a year, either to go back into business development or take a leave of absence. I described in my Q2 call that there was one more large package to be delivered, probably in August: he delivered it and left for a vacation that might have stretched out to a couple of months. At that time I appointed Sam Peterson Acting CIO, thinking we would sort it all out when Shawn returned. In fact, however, the last package did not really spin up as well as we had hoped, and after a few weeks Shawn cancelled his leave to come back and help. He has been here a few weeks, things are much better (albeit not completely resolved), and so he has taken a leave of absence. Sam is CIO (although, since we eschew “C” titles here, officially it is “SVP Technology”). I do have a non-IT mission for Shawn that will keep until he returns, if he decides to return: he has put in 5 hard years working for Overstock and is due a rest.
Since our executives rarely if ever sell stock, and since I keep buying it, the miscreants claim that there is some kind of “blood oath” among us not to sell stock. Shawn in fact has only bought stock, except for the time he exercises options to buy a car, and the time he exercised some to get $50k to fund a small restaurant in his hometown. Yet Shawn met a girl in Europe and wanted her to come back with him to the USA when he was done his vacation. He needed money to move out of the Marriott Residence Inn (where has lived for 5 years) to buy a home and her a car. So he sold 2,700 shares, some or all of which were shares that he had personally bought in the open market at $11 a couple years ago. This leaves him with about 60,000 options (if memory serves), at least half of which have vested and which he could have cashed in for half a million to a million, but which he choose not to do. He got off the plane and placed an order to sell some shares because our blackout period was about to go into effect (September 15), so he could have the funds to move out of the Marriott and find a home when his gal showed up. He placed the order before even being back in the office, and before he was aware of any inventory uploads or marketing blitz the following Friday.
The reason Shawn sold when he did, then, was that we have about the most restrictive blackout period in corporate America, and if he did not do it then he would not have been able to sell a share until late October or early November; he had a gal moving over from England, and did not want to start off with her in the same Marriott room he has been living for five years; and he was not aware of quite what was going on in the office. That said, Shawn has now split again, and does not expect to come back.

http://www.powersellersunite.com/archive.php/o_t__t_2211__overstock-commercials-and-str.html

Auctions are in trouble

tuckerbunny2

Joined: 29 Apr 2005
Posts: 149
Location: Pennsylvania
Posted: Thu Sep 15, 2005 9:33 pm Post subject: Re: Loyalty Leaders

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Back in the day, DH worked for a company that instead of giving raises, propped up the ego by raising your title. Folks could brag they got a promotion to VP or Senior VP, CEO ~you get the idea. What it amounted to was more work, more responsibility, new title but NO extra money. I learned early on to steer clear of folks that cater to my ego over what I need.

jmho it’s pretty obvious O is out of ideas. A year & many titles later, the bluff is up. Saddens me to say it, I thought O had the best shot at taking on ebay.

Good luck to you elgato, let us know how the sales are

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LurkeyLou

Joined: 19 Feb 2005
Posts: 286
Location: Costa Mesa, CA
Posted: Thu Sep 15, 2005 11:09 pm Post subject: Re: Loyalty Leaders

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amen, t-bunny!

I did a little enlightning research at O a few months ago. It explained loud and clear why these titles are so important to this company, as well as the reason that chaos reigns supreme.

It’s the age demographic. Status, titles, those sorts of things, are more important to a higher majority of people of a certain age group. All of the registered O members that I could find and every single one that I’ve ever spoken with, fall into this age group: 20 – 30 years old.

While status symbols are important across every age group, a higher percentage of 20 – 30 year olds strive to project a successful status with visual cues, and labels are important part of the formula.

I’ve been irritated by the constant chaos at O. They start off in one direction and it’s as if someone yells “Hey! Look what I found!” and everyone abandons projects to go play with the new thing. Priorities change on a whim and knee jerk reactions are a common occurance. Wants are frequently addressed before needs.

I looked up Holly’s profile after reading the reason she wanted to institute the TM/BS. From her profile, I accessed feedback. From the feedback, I accessed other employees and their feedback and followed this trail around for a little while.

I suspect that until the youth and vitality of the auction division of this company is tempered with maturity and experience, sellers will continue to find the course terribly bumpy.

In the meantime, Byron made an announcement regarding advertising:
http://forums.auctions.overstock.com/viewtopic.php?t=10156

teresa008

Joined: 20 Jul 2005
Posts: 248
Location: Washington state
Posted: Thu Sep 22, 2005 8:20 pm Post subject: Re: Loyalty Leaders

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It’s definitely not you who’s changed, suze. I’m left wondering if the whole purpose of overstuck auctions wasn’t misrepresented from the beginning. It’s pretty clear that they don’t care how many of us leave now that we’ve gotten them a big enough name that everyone’s heard of them, well…… at least the auction sellers anyway. They’ve gotten a few of the bigger guys to try them out and given them enough incentive to stick around for a while, so why would they still need us?? I’m really starting to wonder though, like a few other people, if the purpose of the whole thing wasn’t just to get more of the retail market share for the other side. 😡 🙁

The press is starting to call them on their blarney and spin.
No matter how elegantly or intelligently Patrick phrases it,
b.s. is b.s.

And the public is a lot smarter than these elitist kids think we are. But you don’t need a P.H.D. to see that auctions has no selection and no buyers. Whatever New Economy tactics they’re using ain’t working.
Sanders

Jeff, I apoligize for cutting and pasting the entire stories vs. just putting up the url, but I read in the forum that a lot of posts get deleted. So just in case, I cut n pasted the posts. I guess if I crowded your blog you have every right to delete these.
Notice in this Post the name “Southie”.
She is the gal who I referred to in one of my earlier post where she was discussing a “Sith Lord type” from Wall Street to Patrick. It appears that she has had enough as well.
I wonder if she will Tell who the Sith Lord is?
She could make a lot of money by calling up Ron Insana.

BigfootDepot

Joined: 27 Apr 2005
Posts: 112
Location: Northwest Ohio
Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2005 9:01 pm Post subject: Re: When the boss is away 😯

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I don’t believe Patrick took a leave, I believe it was one of the top IT guys that departed.

As to the rest, I said it before and I will say it again. I believe Overstock Auctions has been mismanaged since Day-1. They asked the sellers what they wanted/needed and then ignored the requests and implemented changes based on a personal agenda. While some that were there near the beginning were fairly new at auction sales, there were many veterans and many that wanted to jump ship on eBay. Those experienced sellers told Overstock what was needed and what additional things they wanted ….. and the information was basically collected and thrown on a pile on someone’s desk to be looked at at a later date. 1 year from the intoduction of the auction site and they FINALLY supply the capabilities to delete unsold and sold items.

BBL – asked for 9 months ago … still not there.
Ability to cancel bids … still not there.
Ducth or Multiple Qty items … still not there.
Stores … still not there.

TM/BS … personal agenda of someones
Ratings calculations … who knows where that came from

What is needed by an auction site for having a chance at succeeding?
a) ask 50 grizzled veteran sellers
b) ask 1 person who spent a little over a year dumping unwanted items on eBay that weren’t even theirs, so cost — price — profit were terms of little consequence
c) do the initial programming ‘offshore’
d) have auctions be the ‘red-haired step-child’ for the real profit center

Pick those that would apply.

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southie

Joined: 25 Aug 2005
Posts: 237
Location: Sunny Florida
Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2005 9:58 pm Post subject: Re: When the boss is away 😯

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How about:
E – All of the Above? 😆

I agree with the postings, right or wrong, it’s a mess! BIG MESS!

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dragonlady55

Joined: 30 May 2005
Posts: 151
Location: New Jersey
Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2005 6:50 am Post subject: Re: When the boss is away 😯

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I’m so glad that I don’t have anything listed there because I can’t even get the site to load anymore. There seems to be a problem with the live help stuff. It stays on the bottom trying to load but won’t! I can’t even go there and lurk anymore! 🙁 – NOT!!!!

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southie

Joined: 25 Aug 2005
Posts: 237
Location: Sunny Florida
Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2005 1:17 am Post subject: Re: Notes From Holly (Overstock VP/Auctions)

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Hmmmm – Noticed she(Holly) said “direct all frustrations
and anger upon her”????? Isn’t that what some of the O-members got
booted from Overstock Auctions in the FIRST place???

Holly MacDonald-Korth wrote: › docWrite(“quote”)Please direct all anger and frustration at me. This is my fault for not getting this done sooner.

Hmmmmmmmm ~ this is going to be interesting, very, very interesting!
🙄

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tuckerbunny2

Joined: 29 Apr 2005
Posts: 149
Location: Pennsylvania
Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2005 7:26 am Post subject: Re: Notes From Holly (Overstock VP/Auctions)

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ROFL Looks like some folks directed their anger & frustration in the right place & the posts were removed…

http://forums.auctions.overstock.com/viewtopic.php?t=10287&postdays=0&postorder