A lesson to take away here is that a startup which faces legal/regulatory threats to their existence has to be small enough to be ignored or huge enough to chan

A lesson to take away here is that a startup which faces legal/regulatory threats to their existence has to be small enough to be ignored or huge enough to change the rules. Uber is probably the first company you think of, with their absurdly large investment rounds, or maybe PayPal, but don't forget YouTube. They went from a little video portal with everyone else's stuff on it to a protectorate of one of the world's largest businesses so quickly the copyright holders had no chance to deprive it of existence. The danger zone is in the middle. Homejoy didn't expect to be in this kind of trouble, but once they were, it made finding a huge round of funding both necessary and impossible. So this is the rational decision.