tarous

It's really sad to see how the role of Mike Reining is being diminished here. He was one of the founding partners and quite important to the company, especially on the business (making money) side.

He dropped a really successful career to team up with Vishen to build the company up, so it's not very fair to leave him out of the picture, or suggest that he was a "mistake".

Knowing quite a lot of people from the company, I can also say their turnover rates are crazy - most of the best guys are gone, and not many people stay in the company more than 1-2 years. That's quite weird for a company boasting about a great corporate culture, don't you think?

It's funny to see Yanik Silver mentioned there at the top of Vishen's networks. Perhaps this very thorough article on The Verge, will shed some light on how people like Yanik work: http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/10/2984893/scamworld-get-rich...

From what I know - and I do know a few people in the company - the other partner is still not fully paid. So it seems like the profits from the company are going largely there.

The company reached the the 15M in sales only 1 or 2 years ago - they were much smaller earlier. So there is no way $5M in cash. Also, knowing how the company used to function, I think Mike Reining was really important to its growth, so it's really unfair to ignore his input.

If you look at the company story, at the time Mike had a really great career - working for Boston Consulting Group and later as the Head of New Ventures at eBay, where he worked on the Skype takeover (Google his Linkedin profile). It was Vishen who was chased out of the US with the green card/visa requirements and Mike just was the only person who decided to team up with him, drop his position at eBay and set off to Malaysia to do something fresh.

It's safe to say it wouldn't happen without the German guy at all.

The company sells products created by other authors. They have a few small ones (like apps), but they are not the core of the business. Take a look at other stuff, like quantumjumping.com - that's pretty... serious? They have things like astral projection too - and other weird stuff.

Employees are not paid much - most of these 100 people earn within 12-18k USD per year MAX. They opened and renovated two big offices in the last 3 years too, so I think they are quite saddled with debt if you ask me.

The overall profit margin for the whole business is about 5-10%, so really not much, considering renovation, hiring and equipment costs.