Eve Andersson's Diary of a Start-Up is a precise and well documented summary of how VC's destroyed ArsDigita - the company she helped found.

"Lessons learned

Over the past 1.5 years, the VCs and their management team have taken a profitable, healthy, interesting company and:

• spent the profits that ArsDigita had saved
• spent all the capital raised
• destroyed an excellent software product
• released a horrible product a year behind schedule
• hired a slew of incompetent managers
• fired the people who made ArsDigita profitable
• repeatedly lied to customers
• repeatedly lied to employees
• repeatedly lied to the press
• repeatedly lied to the outside developer community
• and given themselves big bonuses as a reward

Greylock and General Atlantic Partners have mis-managed ArsDigita into the ground.

What can we learn from this? Be clear about control. Don't assume that people with MBAs know a thing about business, let alone technology. Don't throw out your prime source of revenue before another one is in place. Fashionable programming languages don't equal useful software. Don't lie. And steer clear of General Atlantic Partners and Greylock."