the article is interesting but without context it's kind of pointless. how do we know he is not making this up?

the company had supposedly revenue of 150mil with net loses of around 100mil. my guess is that this was some kind of online shop with very tiny profit margins.

EDIT: who would be buying an online shop? the only company I know of is Amazon, could this company in the article be http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/30/woot-amazon/ ?

Pretty sure it's Woot. Coincidences?

1. See if you can find anything on the VCs who backed Woot. There's nothing on Crunchbase and nothing on Google. No-one is trumpeting it as a success, or even mentioning it in their (previous) portfolios.

2. Purchase price was reportedly $110m in cash - exact same number as in this post.

3. Post says firm was founded by close friends. He seems to live in Seattle, which is where Woot is/was based.

4. Current CEO of Woot, and presumably CEO at the time, has protected his tweets.

Woot is based in Dallas, TX

The article says they focused on "product quality". Given that Woot's often hawking items described as "the world's crappiest projector" and refurbished items, that would seem to rule them out.

It doesn't seem to be woot.

Their founder is also their CEO.

I agree. I don't know why, cause I truly don't know enough about the company...but for some reason... I'm thinking Zappos.

The emphasis on culture reminded me of Zappos, but the ratio of Zappos funding to the acquisition price doesn't match the one from the story.

"the ratio of revenues, losses, final price and outcome are, to my knowledge, accurate"

The relative amounts are what matter. The story also now says he'll delete any comments on the blog speculating about the company in question.

Zappos sold for 15x the 60M investment, so seems unlikely.

Could it be about LiveSocial? Amazon was rumored to be investing in them..