Well, it's been a long week and this seems an appropriately crazy way to end it. It's off by several orders of magnitude. VentureBeat never called for the story but I'd be happy to speak about it if they'd like to.

I hate reading attention grabbing, poorly reported articles like this (if this is true).

It would be neat if HN attributed karma to domain names's, so that consistently poorly reported stories begin to affect new submissions from the same domain.

page views first, facts later seems to be the trend :/

Perhaps it WAS a lemon, but it was still a $40MM lemon at the end of the day.

No matter how you analyze it, several startups have suffered a far worse fate.

Not sure why all the haters come out every time a sale, acquisition or shutdown is announced.

Haters? If startups are allowed to act so smug with imaginary valuations, the "haters" are certainly allowed to gloat when those valuations are shown to be what they are. These are the rules to this particular game.

Really? I didn't know that rule.

Valuations represent investors' hopes. People's hopes for ambitious projects are often disappointed. Is it ok to gloat whenever someone announces an ambitious target, and doesn't hit it? Is it ok to gloat when someone enters a marathon and fails to finish, for example? Seems to me like an asshole move.

Yeah, it's an asshole move, but asshole moves are to be expected in such a high-stakes game. If someone works really hard on a project that fails, or doesn't do as well as he'd hoped, its definitely mean, and idiotic, to gloat. But, if in the process he gets to gamble tens of millions of dollars of other people's money, well, that's a different thing altogether. The project may very well still be his passion , he may very well work just as hard - or harder - but once he takes all that money that's a different territory.

If someone fails to finish a marathon after confidently convincing a lot of people to place large bets on his winning, I don't know if that makes it "ok" to gloat, but it's certainly asking for it.

To put it simply: when you run a marathon you want to be valued for your effort; when you ask people to bet on you, you're asking to be judged on the outcome.

A win or a loss, I understand there are some very talented, and nice, people involved, and I hope they won't let whatever happens to them affect their self worth, their true valuation, too much. They will still be just as talented and just as nice even when they choose to play a high-stakes game and lose and feel some humiliation, perhaps, when others do gloat for justified or not-so-justified reasons. It sure does sting, but that's life. A man's (or a woman's) true worth isn't measured by his success, and that's important to remember. People will gloat, though.