I know that this must be your gut reaction to the article, because it was written less than an hour after the link was posted, and it's possible that you didn't

I know that this must be your gut reaction to the article, because it was written less than an hour after the link was posted, and it's possible that you didn't read the blog post very carefully: it alleges two serious breaches of normative commercial behaviour that I won't characterize legally. There's firstly the failure to cancel a charge for a non-forthcoming product, of course; more seriously that the company is still signing up and charging new customers. So, with that in mind, I want to invite you to review it, because if it's a reaction that considers the full details of the matter, I have to say that it doesn't really pass the smell test, in my judgement. You cite the failure mode of startups as a "fact of life" with regards to two particulars, and minimize the ethical responsibility of the hypothetical non-technical CEO on the basis of implied incompetence and his or her technical inability to do anything about the situation due to both his or her failure to plan for the eventuality and the actions that he or she has just taken. That leaves you with two "that's just how it is" statements and one "what can I [he] do about it anyways" statement, lined up against one "could this have been handled better? Yeah" statement. I believe you might agree that that looks like a pretty weak argument, on a second read; if not, I'm certainly interested in what you have to say about it. If you're the non-technical CEO of a subscription commerce company in this situation, did you mean to do anything wrong? Of course not, no-one is going to assume that. Does that mean you aren't to blame and it's not your fault and you're not responsible for the situation because who knew startups were high-risk and computers are hard? In the scenario you outline, it would not give me confidence in a person to hear that he or she believed such a thing. More notably, though, and perhaps interestingly, the author mentions that it does not give her any particular confidence in "Techstar" as a brand. Interesting because of the implicit assumption that the VC incubators are effectively vouching for the reliability of the startup and assuming a degree of governance / diligence with regards to the potential extremes of the outcome, which in turn raises the question of whether that's an idea that the incubators are selling (perhaps unwittingly) to their prospective investments. So, I think something like that might be more productive to talk about than situational ethics, really. But I didn't want to leave you with the mistaken belief that everyone had come to the same conclusions about the facts of life.