Stay away from comVentures and Roland! They screwed FilmLoop and Nishan Systems too! Here's some more info:

http://venturebeat.com/2007/02/13/filmloops-demise-the-reput...

http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=43685

One commenter in this article on Zantaz offers a list of VCs to avoid:

http://venturebeat.com/2007/07/06/zantazs-375m-payday-and-th...

"ComVentures/Roland van der Meer, Crescendo/Spreng, Worldview/Orsak and Wei have similar operating approaches as reflected in the cases of Zantaz, Nishan, Force 10 and other Worldview deals."

Fellow entrepreneurs, beware! Wolves are out there. In today's age, it's easy to vett these VCs.

Well, it's better to get none of something big than a big part of nothing, right? Wait a second...

In a linked article, it was reported that one of the founders got 650k, which is still nothing compared to the 375M. It really makes you look at the reputations of the VCs.

"The reportedly terminally ill founder, William Bankert, will end up with only $650,000 or so from the sale." http://venturebeat.com/2007/07/06/zantazs-375m-payday-and-th...

I checked who their VCs were, made quite a discovery.

http://www.generalatlantic.com/usa/news/newsarticle.asp?id=1...

Name familiar to anyone? General Atlantic were Ars Digita's VCs:

http://www.waxy.org/random/arsdigita/

general atlantic are a bunch of buffoons, for sure. of course what philip never mentions is that he personally did the deal with GA because they were offering the most money.

375 million isn't a firesale; especially when you're dealing with "email archiving" which sure sounds like a wrapper around the "cp" command.

It's more than just "cp": you have to be able to index and search all that data (including attachments) to make it useful for legal & regulatory reasons, and that becomes less than trivial when dealing with upwards of a million emails per day.

Even if that's true, that wouldn't be the first time someone made a boatload of money by doing something technically trivial. cp is hard for normal people to use, so throw a nice GUI on it and you end up with Veritas (backup software providers) and these guys.

Just a "cp" command?! Heh... do you realize that some of the most successful startups in the recent history have been reimplmentation of various UNIX commands? Think about it for a second...

napster?

Who re-implemented rsync? Who re-implemented finger? What about talk?

When you start looking, you'll realize that blogger, mozy, twitter, GTalk etc. etc. are nothing more than versions of UNIX command line programs :)

They say that a successful startup will implement and modernize one of the UNIX command line programs. I couldn't agree more.

You know that wasn't meant to be taken seriously...

I would have just pointed out that Napster was released in 1999. In the technology world that's ancient times.