Well, it's been a long week and this seems an appropriately crazy way to end it. It's off by several orders of magnitude. VentureBeat never called for the story but I'd be happy to speak about it if they'd like to.
I hate reading attention grabbing, poorly reported articles like this (if this is true).
It would be neat if HN attributed karma to domain names's, so that consistently poorly reported stories begin to affect new submissions from the same domain.
Haters? If startups are allowed to act so smug with imaginary valuations, the "haters" are certainly allowed to gloat when those valuations are shown to be what they are. These are the rules to this particular game.
Valuations represent investors' hopes. People's hopes for ambitious projects are often disappointed. Is it ok to gloat whenever someone announces an ambitious target, and doesn't hit it? Is it ok to gloat when someone enters a marathon and fails to finish, for example? Seems to me like an asshole move.
