Start the REvolution without me...

Well, that sure sounds like a funding deal that fucked up majorly. The entire founding team, board, and most of the company was fired right after doing a funding round and bringing in a new CEO and COO? What kind of fucked up VC did that?

http://www.nbvp.com/, that's who. Now, I don't know if this story is true, but if it is, it should serve as a huge flashing neon warning sign to any other entrepreneurs to stay well away from North Bridge Venture Partners.

A clear risk of any funding involving a control shift but especially so when dealing with second- or third-tier VCs who are in it only for the money and have no reputation to protect.

I have seen this happen as well with acquisitions in which the founders are assured that they will be able to earn out their main reward over time only to be terminated shortly after the closing.

Legal protections (usually, for founders only and not for other employees) are available in both cases to help limit the damage but a surprisingly large number of founders are willing to forego them when they are assured in ever so reassuring tones that they can "trust" the party that will have control. Unfortunately, trust doesn't work in most such cases.

Well it's nice to see they score 2/5 on: http://www.thefunded.com/funds/show/North+Bridge+Venture+Par...

Second round of funding at almost 8-digits for an open source software company that is losing money? If I was running the business I'd have done exactly what the investors did: cull anything non-core, focus on creating revenue, and bring in someone with experience building a business (looks like they brought in the founder of SPSS).

If the people who think they've been screwed here really believe in the value of what they're doing, they have a great opportunity to simply fork the project. Lots of people would kill for this type of PR! If they're not willing to do this because they are incapable of bringing a business to profitability or need funding, they should hardly be complaining about the actions of their investors.

Someone want to give the rest of us the Cliff's Notes on what this company did and what this person did for that company?

> "We built a small team to work on "Community Engineering"...

> "We set up an Advisory Board designed to advise REvolution management about decisions relating to REvo and Open Source..."

Honestly, this sounds fluffy feel-good bureaucratic big-company bullshit to me, the kind of thing that has no place in a startup. Maybe the new CEO is a really smart guy...

They have more lawyers... with bigger stacks of papers. Unless it's in writing in these things assume the worst is coming.