Leah Culver can't do startups right. First Pownce, now Convore. What's next? Grove? Let's wait and see.
Besides, don't we pride ourselves on accepting failure and treating it as a learning experience?
While she might not be the best computer scientist in the world of startups, she's great at the other roles in a startup, and is certainly a competent developer now. Not everyone in a startup needs to be a classically trained computer scientist with a Stanford PhD. Not every successful startup has to look like Google. You know who also wasn't a great computer scientist? Steve Jobs.
(I actually met esr when I was growing up in Pennsylvania, too -- he ran the local community Free-Net which I used for Internet access. He was a hardcore geek back then, and seems to have shifted more toward self-promotion and politics over time. He actually wrote some decent code for BSD/OS and ISP operations.)
Pownce ultimately would have been forced to shutdown due to the popularity of Twitter and Facebook I think, but that doesn't mean that it itself wasn't a good product.