Francis Koenig / Adultvest and iPorn drama worth sharing
Hi GFY folks -
Below is an email I just sent to Francis Koenig, President and CEO of Adultvest and iPorn. I believe it's worthy of being an open letter to this community. Cheers to all, and happy fourth.
Francis -
I received the check you sent, however, as Mike had warned me, you decided to cut the dollar amount for less than we had agreed upon.
So tell me, how is that justified in your mind? I had discussed my rate with Mike - I was quite firm that it was $60 an hour, and you guys had paid that rate for the prior work I had done on the iPorn site.
Mike called not once, but twice after I had sent my invoice and said that you had requested that I cut my rate. The first time I refused, on principal, because as I told Mike, we agreed on $60 an hour. Mike agreed and said he'd send out a check. Two weeks passed, so I emailed asking if the check had been sent. Mike called again, apologized for having to ask me again to cut my rate, but said it was coming from you. I agreed to take 10% off the top, and stated that I no longer wanted to work with you guys.
I sent in my invoice, forced '10% discount' applied, yet even after that you cut a check for less than that amount. That is not only unprofessional, it's unethical.
I like to think that working in the adult business is akin to mainstream, but actions like yours make me think otherwise. My only other experience working in adult has been as Creative Director with XBiz for a few years. Alec is a fair and honest businessman who treats his employees well. Clearly I was mistaken to take that experience and apply the same trust to your project.
What baffles me here is that you are doing this to an individual. You're not shorting a large company - you're taking money directly out of someone's pocket. I'm an artist that does design work to pay rent and keep up with my school loans. You decided to take over $800 off of my bill - that's a large cut for someone like me.
I, along with the rest of your team, put in the hours and many late nights in order to make sure that under a tight three-week deadline, with no real formulated idea of what you wanted the site to be, you had a site up by Erotic LA. It's interesting to me that you'd pay a mint for the 'iPorn' name, then not pay the people that work hard to make it a reality.
I like to think the best of folks, but you've made me realize that greed is an unfortunate part of human nature. I'm glad I'm not in your shoes, having to wake up every morning thinking about the people I've walked all over.
You have an excellent team - all individually good people. You should be thankful for that, but my guess is that if you've slighted me, I'm not the only one.
It's interesting that through Adultvest you also claim to manage other people's money as a hedge fund manager. I can only imagine what the accounting on that must look like.
An organization can easily be tarnished from the top down, and as you embark creating affiliate programs and the like with the 'iPorn' brand, know that reputation goes a long way.
What goes around, comes around. Good luck to ya.
Kasey
* Also, just a bit of advice - as you cheat webmasters going forward, I highly
recommend changing the passwords on the websites they've done work on.
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