I think it's a difficult dilemma, but ultimately the founders don't owe the community unless people were paying for a service. Firstly, without the founder there would be no community, secondly, their work created and made the community possible. They have to be responsible to themselves, and that might mean taking a break.

If the community wants to remain a community then normally someone else will step up, that's the power of community, it's bigger than just a web site. In the case of couch surfing v2 seems to be going strong.

I would hope the founder of a company with a successful community would at least try to pass on the name and membership to community members or other entrepreneurs who would try to continue the community. I'm sure there are plenty of entrepreneurs and businesses who would have been happy to get nothing but the domain name and member list to try to start a new couchsurfing (though it appears that the service came back just fine on its own).

CouchSurfing International Inc was registered as a non-profit and is now a charity.

Knowing a bit about it (having been a volunteer for the org) I think the crash was extremely badly handled. For better or worse, many people were relying on the service to find places to stay, connect with people in foreign cities, and so on. Leaving those people high and dry is bad karma. Likewise, users should be encouraged to make "backups" in the form of phone nos, email addresses, etc if the reliability of the site can't be guaranteed.

I think the problem is a classic one in technology. The geeks at the helm are over confident. Their self belief clouds their judgement with regards to backups, failure planning, and so on.

Sometimes, it just seems like the universe is trying to send us a message. Take that in a spiritual way if you want, or take it in the sense that a cataclysmic (relatively speaking) forces us to reevaluate our priorities.

Certainly, if this happened to me and I came to that decision, I'd put up a forum for everyone so that they could engage and figure out post-startup plans. But that's me.

I think you make a great point ibsulon. If you did take the decision to close down the site, the least you could do is signpost users to somewhere else where they could continue to communicate.

As far as I'm aware, during the CouchSurfing crash, some volunteers set up a separate forum, but it wasn't sanctioned or initiated by the founder, I believe he simply walked out. :(