Definitely a frustrating story to read. That said, two things stand out: 1) Deals fall through. PG et all write about this all the time. It's probably easy

Definitely a frustrating story to read. That said, two things stand out: 1) Deals fall through. PG et all write about this all the time. It's probably easy to figure why they fail in hindsight, but that doesn't make them any easier to manage in the future. 2) It seems like the main premise of the idea was to get bought by google/yahoo/microsoft. That is a dangerous strategy to employ out of the gates (although back in 2005 there was no hacker news and a whole let less general knowledge about the black art of startups).