While I'm not a fan of Leah Culver at all (I view her as Eric Raymond^2, better at selling the image of geekiness than at actual coding), most startups fail even with good founders.
Besides, don't we pride ourselves on accepting failure and treating it as a learning experience?
I've met her a couple times, and have a different opinion. (I admit, I was biased a bit before meeting her, based on all the press and the murder of a friend's RAID while drunk...)
While she might not be the best computer scientist in the world of startups, she's great at the other roles in a startup, and is certainly a competent developer now. Not everyone in a startup needs to be a classically trained computer scientist with a Stanford PhD. Not every successful startup has to look like Google. You know who also wasn't a great computer scientist? Steve Jobs.
(I actually met esr when I was growing up in Pennsylvania, too -- he ran the local community Free-Net which I used for Internet access. He was a hardcore geek back then, and seems to have shifted more toward self-promotion and politics over time. He actually wrote some decent code for BSD/OS and ISP operations.)
Ellie, don't begrudge someone because of misinformation. Sixapart acquired Pownce, and Convore is a success since the fruits of the developers labor live on in Grove. I still remember Leafy Chat, which is probably the inspiration for Convore. Regardless, they all were great products.
Powce was successfully sold to Six Apart. She has a proven track record of building things that people like and want to use, but you can't win them all.
Sure. They went straight to work on something similar that Six Apart was cooking up. But, there have been many amazing products shutdown over the years due to talent acquisitions.
Pownce ultimately would have been forced to shutdown due to the popularity of Twitter and Facebook I think, but that doesn't mean that it itself wasn't a good product.
Besides, don't we pride ourselves on accepting failure and treating it as a learning experience?