Not a complete disaster, no, but from one perspective not a great ending:
It's not necessarily a only a venture capital funded company. In most startups, there are also Founder investors/employees. These are the people who are likely to to have put significant personal funds into the company, and can be the greatest loosers when a 'fire sale' occurrs. Though their individual financial contribution amounts may look like peanuts to a VC, they have invested time, sweat, tears and occasionally blood to make the company take off to start with, and may be left with next to nothing. The core/founder team, in many cases, will have been made redundant/voted out by the time a company reaches the fire sale point, because the initial development (the very expensive bit, especially in ASIC design) has been done, and the company needs to cut burn rate drastically. So the original skills and knowledge may have disspeared out of the company some time ago.....
Ho hum - at least it wasn't Holographic Storage ;-)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
