"I think trying to name and shame is absolutely the wrong way to go about this. Most of these startup ecosystem folks mean well, and most of them have products

"I think trying to name and shame is absolutely the wrong way to go about this. Most of these startup ecosystem folks mean well, and most of them have products that are well worth the money -- for folks who need the products." Completely agree. I'd love to see more stories that leave out the personal drama and, instead, run some analysis. There are a lot of these companies out there, offering similar services. What's the ROI on spending money with them? Which ones are better than others? How do they rank against each other? To your point: "I think the real problem as entrepreneurs is that we are unable to recognize for ourselves whether we need something or not; so we buy too much. If we're too ignorant to know what to spend our money on, can't well blame others for selling us stuff." We can't blame others for selling us this stuff, but we can and should share our experiences. It's completely legitimate to share a bad experience (or a good experience). There is a lot of opacity in this space, and transparency is going to help ease it. I am completely with you, though: I could do without the public outing of names and email addresses. And I hate smear campaigns, even when they appear to be warranted. A lot of people make stupid mistakes when they're young and dumb; few people deserve to have those mistakes chase them across the internet for the rest of their lives. (As will probably be the case with the immature BD guy named in the article. If even half of what was said about him is true, he deserves to be fired, and his former employer should issue an apology to Ms. Fichtner. But does he really deserve a life sentence?) In general, I wish tech blogs would focus more on tech and less on people. Leave gossip to the gossip blogs. It's hard to tell where informative journalism ends and personal vendetta begins in pieces like these. So I've trained myself to gloss over them. That's unfortunate, because underneath the thicket of naming-and-shaming, there's often some wisdom or advice to be found.