"The developer had no intention of being the project’s developer (?) he was not really a developer, he was a computer science graduate who owned a webdev shop and was used to managing, not coding."

Heard this story so many times. Amazing how many people join a startup and don't want to do the actual work. Remember that scene in The Social Network where Mark Zuckerberg calls his outsource team about progress on that latest feature? No? Me either.