Some of these comments confuse me. What do you expect an m&a email to read like? Having been through a bunch of acquisitions, that email is par for the course, especially for a (presumably) smaller acquisition. You have an internal product sponsor who asks for basic financial info, asks for a price, has clearly laid out next steps and the process, and wants to start immediately. All positive for a first step. Some of the best corp dev guys I know have the worst grammar and email manners and to focus on that as a weakness is ridiculous...as long as they can approve a wire transfer, who cares? Some people are Youtube and have Eric layering sweet sugary syrup on their Pancakes whilst they discuss the beautiful synergies of a monster deal, but most of the time, the startup CEO is hustling it across the finish line.

> "For the little story, Zlio, became blacklisted/sandboxed by Google 6 months after…. It killed the company…"

This is only speculation, but it looks like zlio.com was sandboxed/blacklisted because of rampant spamming. 4 out of the top 5 referring domains are porn sites (about 150k links).

Source: http://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/refdomains/subdomains/zlio.c...

What an awful email. Reads like a lazy VC associate trying to do as little work as possible to pass along metrics to higher ups.

They wanted financials and a valuation range? And then deep communications about technical challenges and workarounds? Reminds me that one of the nice things about owning a company is you can tell people to go away.

Social eCommerce Site Zlio Joins the Deadpool: http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/19/social-ecommerce-site-zlio-...

Why is it now trendy to publish private mail like this? Is there really that much public benefit to be had?

Looks like they also got banned from selling on Amazon too... http://techcrunch.com/2007/05/21/zlio-banned-from-amazon/

I always used to wonder about the contents of the first mail when an acquisition offer is made. Sad if all read like this! I hope not.

Of course I don't know what the terms were, but if you're in a position to decide to take on (more?) VC or sell to Google I'm inclined to say going with the latter is the better choice.

If you're a great visionary you'll have another chance not too far down the road to show the world again. If your good fortune hitched a ride with lady luck to some extent, then shamelessly cashing out your personal bubble is also a smart thing to do.

I love Jeremie's life principle which got him through the Google sandboxing/blackballing and company failure after passing on the acquisition:

“Everything that happens in your life is for your own good”, “Every challenge makes you stronger”... "All he said was, don’t worry, good things will happen after this tough experience"

--http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/ilan-abehassera