I get the feeling from the article that there's something very wrong with this particular startup, or at least the founder in question. "No turning back" sound

I get the feeling from the article that there's something very wrong with this particular startup, or at least the founder in question. "No turning back" sounds like a poor excuse to keep dragging a startup along, trading 25% and a boatload of your time through some investment TV show for just 90k sounds like you've given up on actually working your ass of to develop the product/business, or for that matter, actually being sort of in charge of it if it somehow does manage to survive. The low valuation is not the problem, but twenty-five percent at that valuation? Better do some consulting to scrape that cash together. It might make sense in some situations, just sounds like a bad deal to me if you also have to be on some TV show to actually have a chance at getting it. The article is rather light on details and – as others have already pointed out – on math that makes sense, so I might be getting the sitation completely wrong, but this just strikes me as a really poor way to run a startup.