Cover of "Cry Baby (Director's Cut)"
Cover of Cry Baby (Director's Cut)

Come on, this is perfectly ok:

The technology was of interest to a number of acquirers, including Zappos.com which tried to buy it, and Kumar rounded up a group of angels for its first funding–a $500,000 angel round in August/September 2009.

The only problem—another start-up, Like.com, was doing something similar. Modista’s technology was better, according to Kumar….. But Like.com had a patent on product applications of computer vision. Like.com, which was well-funded with $47 million in venture backing, filed a lawsuit against Modista the day before its funding was going to close. (Like.com was later acquired by Google in August 2010, showing the value of the idea.)…The lawsuit caused investors including Kumar to drop out, for fear of dealing with an expensive lawsuit that could cost more than they had even planned to invest. Because Modista had no money to defend the suit in court, the company later shut down.

So where is the news here? Companies are built to win, not to be nice.

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