Gawker: valleywag, ed sussman

Boat-Loving Fast Company CEO Out of His Office

Owen Thomas — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 15:30:00 EDT

John Koten, the nautical-enthusiast CEO of Fast Company and Inc. publisher Mansueto Ventures, moved out of his office last week ... into a cubicle. The move has magazine workers "freaking out," a tipster tells us.

Now the word is Koten may be out, too — not just of his office, but his job, too. When asked, Koten said he "planned on appearing for jury duty tomorrow." To avoid a leak, we hear managers are calling employees with the news that Mansueto Ventures CFO Mark Rosenberg is taking over temporarily. But we suspect Koten, a fan of both the B-52s and Aristotle's Rhetoric, is happiest while at sea.

After a late-night email sent by Koten urging his employees to interview him to "show some respect" got leaked earlier this month, Koten "had his assistants move all of his stuff into a cubicle outside his office," the tipster told us. Joe Mansueto, the founder of mutual-fund research firm Morningstar and owner of Fast Company and Inc., works from a cubicle. "After several years of working out of an office now seems a really weird time to become "a man of the people,'" our tipster notes.

Koten has an erratic reputation. One media veteran familiar with his career calls him "one of the unheralded geniuses of the magazine business" but also the "laziest man in the world." Legend has it that the devoted sailor once turned down a promotion at the Wall Street Journal that would have had him move from Chicago to New York because of the cost of berthing his boat. (He later made the move, and recently invited Mansueto Ventures employees to bring their children on board his boat for Take Your Children to Work Day.)

Media Business hailed him as one of the top innovators in the magazine business for FastCompany.com and FastCompany.tv. But the architect of those websites, Ed Sussman, was fired in October. FastCompany.tv star Robert Scoble inexplicably lasted through March, despite spending more of his time Twittering than videoblogging. Perhaps Fast Company can bring him back to do a remake of "I'm On a Boat"?

(Photo by rexhammock)

dorian

Alaska Miller — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:40:00 EDT

Ed Sussman, the fired head of Fastcompany.com, isn't sweating the downturn. He already had a startup ready. The takeaway MBA lesson is that if your employee has 4,000 man-hours to waste on a side project, it's more of a reflection on you as a manager. Today's featured commenter, dorian, points out why this isn't that big of a deal:

Of course. How much capital do you really need to bootstrap a software-only business? Let's see, enough to buy a laptop, a pallet of nukables from Costco and pay your internets bill for ~4000 man-hours.

(wait, that sounds eerily like what you get from Paul Graham for 10% equity!)

Fired Fast Company Web chief admits he was moonlighting

Owen Thomas — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 15:20:00 EDT

Here's a career tip from Ed Sussman, the fired head of Mansueto Digital: Have a startup in your back pocket. Since March, he reveals, he's been working on a side project while running the websites of Fast Company and Inc. magazines for Mansueto Ventures. His job was one of 20 eliminated in the cutbacks, which primarily hit the company's online and events divisions. He tells Mediabistro that he and his partners have "put some 4,000 hours into the project" — an effort to commercialize Drupal, an open-source blog software program. Gosh, do you think his boss would have waited until October to lay off Sussman if he had known how much free time his employee had on his hands?

Fast Company publisher to lay off 20

Owen Thomas — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 16:20:00 EDT

Times are tough all over. That's the excuse bosses are now using for cleaning house, making hard decisions they were too timid to execute in bubblier times. We've just heard that Mansueto Ventures, the publisher of Fast Company and Inc. magazines, is laying off 20 people. Inside the company, it's being spun as an "economic move" — but if it's a financially motivated maneuver, why is Fast Company magazine being left untouched in the layoffs?

Most of the cuts are hitting Mansueto Digital, the company's Web arm, previously the fiefdom of executive Ed Sussman. Sussman is leaving the company, and control of Fastcompany.com is now being handed to the magazine's editor, Bob Safian; traffic had fallen by about half on Sussman's watch, while rivals like Wired saw visits to their websites grow quickly. Robert Scoble, the self-obsessed managing director of Fastcompany.tv, will still be employed as of Monday, though he now reports to Safian. Darn!