I suppose this is Google’s mindset nowadays. They’re so big, they can do anything they want to anyone without the capital to fight them.

Hopefully, they will help someone else when making critical decisions about their startup.

… spoken like a gentleman.

@ Mike Schachter

… you need to amend your sweeping indictments about bank CEOs – most are very conscientious and mindful of their depositors and employees. It is the CEOs and other officers and executives and lawyers and brokers of very large financial institutions who created the current bubble pop. Not too many small solid savings banks who wisely avoided taking on risky debt and stayed with boring, tried and true but ultimately profitable risks took a bath, hmmm? A case of greed is good becomes greed is whoops! where’d these banana peels under that ladder that black cat walked in front of came from?

Bob was very honest, approachable, and transparent with us from the start to the end. If only bank CEOs had the same virtues, maybe the United States economy wouldn’t be on the brink of total collapse…

The quote of beware is simply intended to state that startups should beware, not to put the blame elsewhere. I was not wary, and had too much trust in people and their “word”.

Bob Bickel

“By that time, of course, we had used up all of our seed money. And by backing away from our Series A offers, we kind of burned the VC’s. Even better, our development had stalled because of our desires to build stuff aligned with our new direction in the non-evil company.”

So let me get this right, they had a great product, but stopped doing development because they got one offer that wasn’t in any way concrete but they put all their money into preparing a bid for that one offer. Yup, Open Source is all about giving people the freedom to make choices, but it does not guarantee that those people make good choices.

There’s more to this story than Bickel is saying. He’s going to admit how he screwed up and sully his supposed golden boy rep? He’s not a golden boy and you have stars in your eyes. He got greedy and stupid. He thought he was going to get another payday from a company with deep pockets. He also didn’t want to share any potential Google money with VC, so he blew the VC off. He shot his own foot off and screwed over the other people in this venture,too. Go find another hero to worship.

If they got a bone from grandma, that’s Hansel & Gretel (there are cookies and breadcrumbs in that story, too, so it fits into web 2.0 myths).