So yesterday, I talked about the beginnings of Wellsphere. I'm starting to get the feeling that the CEO of Wellsphere, Ron Gutman, is a complete psycho. Instead of the usual ball-aching in the comments, you guys spoke up and agreed with me. Way to not be whiny little bitches, readers. Right on.

Anyway, let's continue the story.

Bustin' A Cap

One morning, a business development employee at Wellsphere was on her way to work. She had to get to a meeting with some potential investors, so there was a sense of urgency in her travel. As she was getting ready to cross the Bay Bridge, her car was shot at. Yes, combat-zone-style shot at. The bullet missed her, but the car took a hit. Obviously shaken up, she called Ron to tell him what had happened. Now, if you were the CEO in this case, and an employee called to tell you she had just been shot at, how would you reply?

1. "Go home and relax. Take all the time you need."
2. "Take the day off, come in tomorrow if you're OK"
3. "Will you be able to make the meeting?"

If you've been following the story, you can probably guess which one Ron chose. Yeah, this dipshit cares about wellness.

Inetta Will Not Be Settin' The Mood At BLX Anymore

Yesterday I mentioned that the original version of Wellsphere (called Wellnet) wasn't a shitty idea. Because Ron couldn't sell it, though, he decided that it was time to build a "community portal". No, wait, scratch that. Ron heard a bunch of buzzwords like Ajax, social networking, user-generated content and collaborative editing and figured he could leverage all this shit into some more financing. And thus, a shitty idea is born.

The next iteration of Wellsphere is what you see today. The development of this disaster had a few minor setbacks, like:

• The entire Rails engineering team quitting en masse because they couldn't deal with Ron's horseshit
• A complete rewrite of a mostly done Ruby-based system in Java for no apparent reason
• A loss of massive amounts of code because of a source code repository corruption

So it's no surprise that what you see today is ridden with XSS vulnerabilities. Not to mention that this turd gets less traffic than Uncov, and we only get like 2-3k unique visitors per day. When we had ads, we didn't even make enough cash to pay our hosting bills. Yeah, these guys are fucked.

Pool's Closed

Employees at Wellsphere have a very short tenure. I'm talking on the order of months. Ron likes to hire a lot of consultants & contractors, so he can be lazy with paying them. Former contractors for the company have told me that actually getting a copy of the employment contract out of Ron is like trying to interrogate a fucking KGB agent.

He farmed a lot of work out to subcontractors in other countries, mainly countries where you could take a few liberties against a person's human rights; countries where if you only paid your contractors 2/3 of what they were owed, they couldn't sue. The best part of doing this was that Ron got to claim that Wellsphere is a global company. Uh, right.

Let's Watch The Failure Parade

Wellsphere probably has a couple million in the bank. I have no idea what their burn rate is, but I am guess it's not that much, because he required employees to bring their own computers to work, although he did buy a $1,600 coffee machine. I'm guessing that when they do finally run out of money, Ron will blame the failure on "not getting enough traction" or "the market not being ready" conveniently sidestepping the fact that the product is a giant cup of duck butter.

Wellsphere: Rated R for adult situations and massive amounts of FAIL.