If you're running a founder-team-only private company without any real assets, the company only really "exists" for as long as the founders can be considered to be its employees. So, if another company comes along and makes an offer to the people to hire them as individual employees—not a company, not even a gelled team, just individual offers—then the company-that-was just sort of ceases to exist, because it now has nobody working for it. I think that's more what happened here.