Tuesday, January 26, 2010

interesting discussion with Allen Stern about Veritcal Managers

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jason Calacanis
Date: Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 10:35 AM
Subject: Re: ?s
To: Allen Stern

You're welcome to talk to Lon Harris who is running the Vertical
Manager program any time Allen. He is cced above.

On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 10:21 AM, Allen Stern wrote:
> Thanks for the reply - yes, had a few questions - here they are:
> -- how many vertical managers are there currently? Is there a list on the
> Mahalo site?

The program is in month three I think and we have nine. We are trying
to add two to four a month and get to 50 in a year or so.

> -- how many of the vm are Mahalo staff?

Zero. We only have three full-time editorial/community folks at
Mahalo. We are pushing the management of page managers out to our
community. We will just set standards and build tools for them going
forward.

> -- when a vm (or page manager) is a Mahalo staff person, do they get a check
> for their earnings or is it retained by Mahalo? Jason seemed to indicate
> previously that the income was retained but I wanted to double check.

No, we pay our staff a salary, give them stock options, etc.

We have put our staff as VMs and PM on the pages we created internally
since giving these high paying pages to the public who didn't build
them wouldn't make sense.

I think the VMs after just two months  are making $500 to $2k a month
(in US dollars)... correct Lon?

we pay them a minimum of $500 a month and assign them 500 to 1,500
pages each in the first month. and right now the top number of pages
they can manage is 3,000.

if your negative spin is we keep the high paying pages for ourselves
that isn't true. We've kept the pages we made internally, but those
are but a few of the top pages. many of the top pages are now owned by
VMs and their PMs.

if you want to talk to VM as well i've cced Rob Brown who is doing technology.

> -- the amount for a payout is currently $150, correct?

yes, we moved it to $150 to accomplish two things:

1. avoid gaming in Answers (where people were doing all kinds of crazy
things to make money).
2. avoid gaming on page management (where people were starting to do
crazy things)

This change has had zero impact on the core members because they can
easily hit this in a month or two. The only people it really effected
were the people gaming the system.

we don't want short term folks in the system who are creating multiple
accounts to award themselves best answer (which was starting to
happen).

best j

Jason on Twitter Mahalo.com This Week in Startups

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