I just wish Dragoneer had the balls to actually make a new journal entry and explain everything that's been going on in depth, including why he wasn't being transparent about the business deal two bloody months ago. Was there some kind of non-disclosure agreement he was forced to sign at gunpoint, forcing him not to tell anyone until it was too late? There is no reason for him NOT to tell the members on FA what's going on. Nothing is inhibiting him from doing so.
You’ll be waiting a long time for those sorts of answers, I reckon.
The NDA’s two month embargo would likely have been made to make sure that no one could scuttle the deal before things could be cemented. I get the feeling that if the conversation came up in public, there would have been enough outrage that IMVU would want to pull out – and maybe Dragoneer would get an offer that was better than he got from IMVU. So for both parties had reasons to keep things quiet for fear that the other may ditch the deal.
The only thing I don’t really understand about the NDA is why no one was prepared to get ahead of this backlash. I mean, if you had 60 days to figure out how to break the news, you would suspect that someone more comprehensive would have been prepared, right? I sort of wonder if Dragoneer thought IMVU was going to handle PR; I mean, PR isn’t his forte. (Nothing against that, there is a reason people are trained for that job. It’s too careful to go too far in an excited moment and try to polish the unpolishable – that’s where that deleted tweet comes in. It’s exactly what I’d say if I was having too much fun playing devil’s advocate to care about the repercussions.) Either way, I feel that they squandered an opportunity to get ahead of the outrage – that, or Dragoneer is meant to keep taking the outrage to tire people out and distract them from directing their anger towards IMVU. (If the latter is the case, I wonder if he knew that was going to be in his job description..)
Depending on the NDA, I imagine that the nitty-gritty is still protected unless the other party consents to its disclosure. That’s why we’ll never get the information; unless they wrote in an expiration date (why would they?), it’s a permanent agreement with assigned penalties for breaches. It is what it is.
On an unrelated note I’ve heard the $20,000 purchase price a few places now, was this just a hypothetical number or is there a basis? It’d be hilarious, given that there was about that much from the fundraiser which IMVU got in the purchase – that means he’d have given away FA for free in exchange for a steady job, which would pay off over time and not be subject to splitting with any devs. However, that is so silly, I suspect that figure came from someone mixing up the fundraising amount with the purchase price.
So many $20ks floating around that they're all starting to look alike!