Last night, a prominent media house had reported that local services provider LocalOye was on the verge of shutting down. The report had cited unnamed sources and used examples from a Quora post to show how LocalOye was beset with profligacy, systemic mismanagement and “too much partying”, and the Tiger-backed company would soon shut shop.
Today morning, LocalOye founder Aditya Rao posted a heartfelt 15-tweet tweetstorm talking about the report and the problems at his company. In an unusually honest and brutal assessment of his company, Rao admits that while Localoye is “wasn’t in the best of situations”, it will live to fight another day.
LocalOye had been accused of hiring and firing indiscriminately in an anonymous Quora thread, which had claimed that people had been fired within a week of their joining. Rao doesn’t seem to deny this claim, but says that everyone who was fired was given 3 months salary as compensation.
Rao gets contemplative in his next series of tweets. He admits that while mistakes were made in running the company, and says he’s been doing some soul searching about his personal role and his leadership skills.
Rao seems to defend one of the chief accusations in the Quora post – the too much partying. “The very first few days of funding was just about partying. The entire tech, marketing and hr team used to sleep in the CEO’s house. They would drink and smoke the whole day and were just blowing away investor’s money.”, the anonymous poster had claimed. Rao says that that partying wouldn’t stop. “We will NOT stop partying hard”, his tweet says. “If you can’t have fun after working for 14 hours, then entrepreneurshIT is not worth it :P”
