Details Come Out As Epinions Founders Sue VCs
from the dirty-laundry dept
It was supposed to be such a Silicon Valley fairy tale — though, at least some folks were skeptical from the beginning. As the company, made up of big name “second generation” dot com stars, built up plenty of hype, it appears they didn’t learn all the important lessons of doing a dot com startup at “internet speed.” We reported late last year that a bunch of the founders were whining that they got cheated out of millions when Epinions was sold off to DealTime and became Shopping.com. It turns out, what they were whining about was that the VC backers of Epinions and one of their own co-founders convinced them to give up their shares, when they already knew that they had a deal in place with Google that would pump up revenue in time for a decent IPO. As the article points out, you don’t often see company founders sue their own investors — but it does give you a sense of how many entrepreneurs do feel at the end of the day where their venture-backed startup doesn’t turn out the way they expected (i.e., whether a success or a failure, they end up on the outside looking in).
