I'm going to project a lot of personal interpretation on this one - but it sounds like the CEO was an "idea man" who tried to create a clone of another software

I'm going to project a lot of personal interpretation on this one - but it sounds like the CEO was an "idea man" who tried to create a clone of another software package because making software is easy, right? My buddy who knows how to program will be the project manager and he can tell me if the developers are trying to snow me - because project management is just doing some spreadsheets and talking to the techies, right? Then we hire a bunch of inexperienced (and easy to bully) developers to build out the idea - no need to pay top wages for a bunch of typists in t-shirts, right? They had neither methodology nor experience in design, implementation, and QA. No one should have been shocked when the project failed, or by the price tag. Pumping money into a project is no assurance of quality. At least the developers got to feed their families during the debacle.