Mike left a comment when someone asked that same question in the post: "of course there is more to the story. but the point is we’d gotten past all the ugly sausage making that goes into any startup and had moved to within days of launching it. An email to us saying “the economics don’t work, we have to talk” would have been a reasonable request. But telling us that we aren’t important to the project, and stating that we don’t own the intellectual property, is just bizarre."