It's telling that you declined a request for an interview, yet still feel the need to clarify on HN. You'd be doing a lot better with transparency and public trust by just taking the interview.
Is there something that's covered by an interview that a list of questions or email exchange wouldn't? Interviews take up a valuable chunk of the CEOs time, so I'm somewhat sympathetic to them declining it.
Reporters take email interviews and interviews with corporate officers besides CEOs all the time. Any CEO can get a media relations person to write up an email response and then check it over quickly -- or have, for example, the CTO do it instead.